UNDER SPRING

UNDER SPRING voices+art+los angeles Jeremy Rosenberg

Heyday, Berkeley, California California Historical Society, San Francisco, California © 2014 by the Metabolic Studio LLC

All rights reserved. No portion of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from Heyday.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rosenberg, Jeremy. Under Spring : voices+art+Los Angeles / Jeremy Rosenberg. pages cm ISBN 978-1-59714-295-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Bon, Lauren, 1962- Under Spring. 2. Outdoor art—California— Los Angeles. 3. Los Angeles (Calif.)—History—Anecdotes. I. Title. N6537.B5875A4 2014 709.794’94—dc23 2014020101

Cover photo and images on pages ii, xxiv, 14, 28, 40, 56, and 72 are courtesy of the Metabolic Studio LLC. Cover Design: Ashley Ingram Interior Design/Typesetting: Rebecca LeGates

Orders, inquiries, and correspondence should be addressed to: Heyday P.O. Box 9145, Berkeley, CA 94709 (510) 549-3564, Fax (510) 549-1889 www.heydaybooks.com

Printed in China by Print Plus Limited. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 contents

vii STATEMENT BY ANTHEA HARTIG AND MALCOLM MARGOLIN ix ARTIST’S STATEMENT BY LAUREN BON xi PREFACE xiii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xv INTRODUCTION xix DRAMATIS PERSONAE

1 1: UNDER SPRING

15 2: THE TOMBS

29 3 HOMELESS

41 4: CONCRETE IS FLUID

57 5: WU WEI

73 6: ANOTHER CITY IS POSSIBLE

97 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

vii statement anthea hartig and malcolm margolin

The California Historical Society and Heyday are delighted to publish the winner of the first annual California Historical Society Book Award: Under Spring: Voices + Art + Los Angeles. We wanted to bestow our first award on a book that would break new ground, a book that would inspire us not only by the information it conveyed but by the form the information took, a book of sound scholarship accessible to a wide audience, a book that breathed with life.

We got what we were looking for in Under Spring, a work of literary daring and unconventional structure that bristles with energy.

In this inspired, intelligent, masterfully constructed crazy quilt, Jeremy Rosenberg viscerally evokes a place—the space under Los Angeles’s North Spring Street Bridge. This site of urban blight was utterly transformed by a visionary, multi-year conceptual art project, Under Spring by Lauren Bon and her Metabolic Studio. To tell this story, Rosenberg assembles and juxtaposes short excerpts of oral histories from a mind-boggling variety of people—scholars, drug addicts, local activists, government officials, architects, musicians, a puppeteer, a choreographer, a viii ANTHEA HARTIG AND MALCOLM MARGOLIN

couple of disc jockeys, security guards, artists, etc. Out of it emerges a complete picture of the transformation, as different experiences are refracted, combined, amplified with a pleasing fullness.

Under Spring is great history—one that embraces pain, beauty, and mystery—and great reading. It is a work that opens us to more fully experience, understand, and feel the past in the present, speaking to us in a new voice that affirms the underlying creativity and worth of the human enterprise.

It is our hope that this book will refresh the spirit, stimulate the imagination, and engender a new way of expressing historical perspectives. We are honored to present the inaugural California Historical Society Book Award winner and we are deeply grateful to our fellow jury members who chose this book: Albert Camarillo, Ph.D., Professor of History, Stanford University; Shelly Kale, Publications and Project Manager, California Historical Society; Eileen Keremitsis, Ph.D., Senior Research Associate, California Historical Society; Gary F. Kurutz, California Rare Books School, California State Library Foundation; Ralph Lewin, former President and CEO, Cal Humanities; and Gayle Wattawa, Acquisitions and Editorial Director, Heyday.

—Anthea M. Hartig, Ph.D., Executive Director, California Historical Society and Malcolm Margolin, Publisher, Heyday ix artist’s statement lauren bon

If you stand on the Spring Street Bridge and look north, you’ll see another bridge, one with faux Ionic columns cast in fiberglass resin. Spring Street and Broadway bridges are two of a dozen bridges that span the Los Angeles River between the San Fernando Valley and Downtown Los Angeles. Like siblings, the two bridges have much in common—proximity to tracks carrying rushing trains past, to the concrete channels of the L.A. River, and to Eastside communities with active gang problems.

A major difference between the two is that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority keeps space under the Broadway Bridge, whereas the space under the Spring Street Bridge has never served an official purpose. People with nowhere else to go showed up regularly here, like nomads who saw this space as part of their commons. It was an unmarked place but also a live node.

My studio space, the Metabolic Studio, is in a repurposed storage building adjacent to the site. From 2006 to 2013, the Studio and I transformed this marginalized public space—“God’s most destitute place on earth” as nearby graffiti proclaimed—into Under Spring, an artwork that encompassed a vibrant venue for art, inquiry, experiments in urban greening, and celebrations both private and public. As the name implies, the artwork is about being under the x LAUREN BON

Spring Street Bridge—really inhabiting it, not just passing by. It is a space we have cared for, lived next to, and breathed into. Under Spring is ultimately a social sculpture. It is about our commons.

The name has other intended meanings. “Spring” calls to mind water—it alludes to the mother ditch, the historic Zanja Madre, which made the first pueblo viable. Under Spring is also suggestive of winter, the season that precedes new growth, a time and place for being underground, for incubation, latency and potentiality.

Currently, the Spring Street Bridge is being broadened and strengthened. This process involves expunging all living things, from artworks to sparrows in their nests. The new underside of the bridge will be different. Large concrete walls to support the enlarged road will divide up the space. There will be more shadows. xi preface

From 2005 to 2009, I was privileged to spend time in an extraordinary place. As a contractor and then an employee of the Annenberg Foundation—a multi-billion- dollar philanthropic entity—I worked on the Downtown Los Angeles–based projects of the artist Lauren Bon. These projects included the creation of a thirty- two-acre park, Not A Cornfield; the formation of the culture hive and think tank, Farmlab, and the Metabolic Studio that followed; and the massive undertaking that became Under Spring.

As a writer, I was used to having to travel from place to place in search of fantastic stories. During the years above, I didn’t have to go anywhere. All the stories came to me. One day, the mayor would stop by. The next, leading academics. The next, Native American activists preparing for a ceremony. The next, famous international artists, musicians, or actors. Then, a homeless heroin junkie looking for a fix. Or somebody looking to take their dog on a walk down by the river.

Such was everyday life at the transfixing and tectonic project called Under Spring, which you’ll read about in the coming pages. Under Spring was, on one hand, a self-contained conceptual artwork. On the other hand, it was a kaleidoscopic microcosm of the city and greater region.

It’s among the biggest clichés of all: “If only these walls could talk…” But for years at and around Under Spring, the graffiti-covered walls cried out a cacophony of words and images. Add to that the various cultural traditions that feature riversides and crossroads as special sites of storytelling, the egalitarian soapbox xii PREFACE

opportunities afforded by many parks, and the specific tradition of open public comment stemming from the pre-planting days of Not A Cornfield; and it seemed appropriate to present the histories of the place in an “as told to” manner.

The interlaced and overlapping storytelling style in the book echoes the pace and mood of the project. Scores of mostly one-on-one interviews were conducted for this book, and sixty-six of those voices ultimately made their way into the text.

By the time you read these words, Under Spring will be long gone, another urban ghost. The recollections cataloged here aim to keep the project’s spirit alive—and inspire other such efforts, whether nearby or afar.

—Jeremy Rosenberg, 2014 xiii acknowledgments

Special thanks to everyone who took the time to be interviewed for and otherwise participated in this project. All quotes are from interviews I conducted except for the following: Ed Porter interview by Monica Henderson for Farmlab at Under Spring, May 2007; Rosmelia Rodriguez interview by Cathy Ortega for Farmlab at Under Spring, December 2008; Ed P. Reyes, Tom LaBonge, Richard Montoya, Deborah Szekely, and Cindi Alvitre quotes from their public remarks during “Optimists’ Breakfast: What Patriotism Means to Me” at Under Spring, February 2009; Autumn Rooney quotes from her diary and used by permission; and Lauren Bon quotes from KCET.org interview with Bill Kelley Jr., “Sustainable L.A.,” June 29, 2008, courtesy KCET.org.

Thank you to Cindy Bautista, Olivia Chumacero, Cathy Ortega, and Teresa Ramirez Katz for Spanish-to-English translation assistance.

Further thanks to John Pecorelli, Steve Rowell, Chris Nichols, Clark Robins, Sharon Sekhon, Jesus Sanchez, Jane Harrington, Julie Pittman, Lila Hempel-Edgers, Dr. Reba Rosenberg, Gail Rosenberg, and Michael Rosenberg.

Extraordinary thanks to Malcolm Margolin, Anthea Hartig, Gayle Wattawa, and everyone involved in this collaboration between Heyday and the California Historical Society.

And, most of all, thank you to Lauren Bon and the entire Metabolic Studio team, past and present.

xv introduction

Back in 2008, researchers at the University of Southern California—where I now work—released a study counting the number of alleys in the city of Los Angeles. That census revealed a staggering 12,309 blocks’ worth of alleys, a cumulative total of 914 linear miles.

This book visits just one of those alleys, the one at latitude 34.0703, longitude -118.2255. But, damn, what an alley it is. Our alley in question is located along the west side of the concrete-straitjacketed banks of the Los Angeles River. The alley is located directly underneath the dry-land portion of the North Spring Street Viaduct—or “Spring Street Bridge” as it’s colloquially known.

This bridge, built in 1928, was one of a quilt of such river crossings constructed in the city when the optimistic City Beautiful Movement still held sway. Train tracks run north-south alongside the river. Warehouses, with floor-to-ceiling industrial garage doors, abut the alley perpendicular to the river. Foreboding barbed-wire fencing runs parallel to the alley.

The area, in recent years known for its homeless population and graffiti, is located near ancient Tongva settlements (which often followed the river), near the locale of the first European account of Los Angeles, a stone’s throw from the heart of the Mexican settlement, and a short walk to the train station once considered L.A.’s Ellis Island. xvi INTRODUCTION

Downtown Los Angeles is within sight—skyscrapers are visible from the section of the alley uncovered by the bridge above. A short walk away, through or around those adjacent warehouses, is a park now known formally as the Los Angeles State Historic Park. Historically it was called “the Cornfield,” thanks to a legend that the vegetable once grew there. In 2005, that former rail yard and urban void was filled by artist Lauren Bon and her cross-disciplinary team. Bon built the thirty-two-acre, fully programmed park on the site when the State wasn’t able to. Bon titled this action/artwork Not A Cornfield. (Part of the piece involved actually growing corn, putting at least one historical question comfortably to bed.)

In 2006, Bon moved her studio headquarters to the warehouses across the street from the park. From 2006 to 2013, while undertaking one intriguing project after another, Bon and her team also set about transforming the alley located underneath the Spring Street Bridge. Bon titled this conceptual art project Under Spring.

Under Spring served as—among many other things—a workshop, a public square, a ceremonial ground, a rehearsal space, a dog park, a conversation in neon, a spot for political stagecraft, a musical instrument, the setting for a hoedown, and a new generation of an infamously bulldozed local urban farm. As an art piece, Under Spring revealed the seemingly infinite potential of overlooked urban space.

This book focuses on Under Spring’s most active public phase, between 2006 and 2009. Under Spring came to an end in 2013, when a controversial widening and retrofitting of the Spring Street Bridge began.

The last time I visited the former Under Spring site, advance pages from this very book had been blown up about ten feet high and twenty feet across and pasted to the bridge. New graffiti covered sections of the text. A construction catwalk was installed above, under the bridge’s roadway, and public works vehicles sat parked where experimental algae fountains, a basketball hoop, a stage, and other delights had previously stood.

Bon and company are no longer involved with the goings-on in the alley, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t dreaming up and executing all manner of other ideas. When I visited, Bon had recently completed One Hundred Mules Walking the Los INTRODUCTION xvii

Angeles Aqueduct, which consisted of her and others riding mules the 240 miles from the Owens Valley in the Sierras to Los Angeles, following the course that carries water from the former, now parched, region to the latter region, which boomed. Closer to home, Bon is, as I write this, working through the myriad jurisdictional approvals required to build a seventy-two-foot waterwheel on the Los Angeles River, just down the banks from the Under Spring site.

Later in the pages of this book, Under Spring participant Gerardo Vaquero Rosas explains how he disperses seeds. “I plant in other places in the Downtown area. Underneath another bridge, I found some small areas that the cement does not cover,” Rosas says. “I went and threw some flower seeds and they came up here and there. I go around doing this.”

This is how ideas are dispersed. Perhaps the voices on the pages that follow will inspire readers to energize forgotten and ignored interstitial spaces in cities far and wide. After all, here in Los Angeles there are something like 12,308 blocks of alleys to go.

xix dramatis personae

Please note that descriptions are circa the Under Spring era.

ANTHONY ADAMS: Los Angeles native.

CARMELO ALVAREZ: Founding director, Radiotron. Team member, Farmlab.

CINDI ALVITRE: Co-founder, Ti’at Society. Educator, activist, and first female chair of the Gabrielino/Tongva Tribal Council. Speaker at Under Spring Optimists’ Breakfast, 2009.

PAUL BACA: Given name of Killradio.com deejay D.J. Chicken Leather.

SALVADOR BAUTISTA: Superintendent, ValleyCrest Landscape Development. Team member, Metabolic Studio.

DENNIS BAXTER: Longtime neighborhood resident. Regular visitor to Not A Cornfield, 2005–2006.

LAUREN BON: Artist, Metabolic Studio.

PEDRO CARRANZA: Employee, ValleyCrest Landscape Development. Team member, Metabolic Studio. xx DRAMATIS PERSONAE

MANUEL CASTELLS: University Professor and the Wallis Annenberg Chair in Communication Technology and Society, University of Southern California. Professor of Communication, Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California. Farmlab Public Salon Series and Under Spring Optimists’ Breakfast speaker, 2008.

OLIVIA CHUMACERO: Team member, Metabolic Studio.

YASKIN CHUMACERO: Activist, hip-hop artist.

BILL CLOSE: Musician, inventor. Artistic director, MASS. Installed and played monumental “earth harp” at Under Spring, 2007.

ALEJANDRO COHEN: Co-founder and deejay, Dublab.com. Musician. Performed at Tonalism at Under Spring, 2007.

MATTHEW COOLIDGE: Founder and director, Center for Land Use Interpretation.

FABIAN DEBORA: Artist, Los Angeles native. Employee, Homeboy Industries.

SHEILA LEVRANT DE BRETTEVILLE: Graphic designer, public artist, and founder of the Woman’s Building adjacent to Under Spring.

ERNESTO DE LA LOZA: Artist, longtime neighborhood resident.

JENNA DIDIER: Founding director, Materials & Applications. Bride at wedding reception held at Under Spring, 2008. Speaker at Farmlab Public Salon Series, 2007.

JANET OWEN DRIGGS: Artist, writer. Team member, Metabolic Studio.

JOHN E. FISHER: Assistant General Manager in charge of Transportation Operations, Los Angeles Department of Transportation.

BRANDY FLOWER: Founder, Hit + Run. Live silk-screened at Under Spring, 2008. DRAMATIS PERSONAE xxi

CONRADO GARCIA: Employee, ValleyCrest Landscape Development. Team member, Metabolic Studio.

KINDRED GOTTLIEB: Los Angeles resident. Participated in La Ofrenda, Under Spring, 2006–2008.

ANTHONY GUTIERREZ: Los Angeles resident.

PRINCE HALL: Caretaker of 1745 North Spring Street building. Formerly lived underneath the Spring Street Bridge.

RUBEN HERNANDEZ: Artist and Los Angeles native. Graphic designer.

OLIVER HESS: Co-director, Materials & Applications. Groom at wedding reception held at Under Spring, 2008. Speaker at Farmlab Public Salon Series, 2007.

ROBYN SIMMS JOHNSON: Comedian, puppeteer. Performed at Under Spring, 2007.

ARI KLETZKY: Artist, Islands of LA. Speaker at Farmlab Public Salon Series, 2008.

MARCO KUSUMAWIJAYA: Visiting MAK Center Urban Fellow from Jakarta, Indonesia. Speaker at Farmlab Public Salon Series, 2008.

TOM LABONGE: City Councilmember for the Fourth Council District, Los Angeles. Speaker at Under Spring Optimists’ Breakfasts, 2008–2009.

JOHNEL LANGERSTON: Founder, Phatefx and Urban Born. Under Spring neighbor.

JOE LESSER: Founder, Los Angeles Railroad Heritage Foundation.

LEO LIMON: Artist known for work on banks of the Los Angeles River. Longtime neighborhood resident. Speaker at Farmlab Public Salon Series, 2008.

JOE LINTON: Los Angeles River expert. Speaker at Farmlab Public Salon Series, 2007. xxii DRAMATIS PERSONAE

RAMON MACIAS: Employee, ValleyCrest Landscape Development. Team member, Metabolic Studio.

SARAH MCCABE: Team member, Metabolic Studio.

MARK “FROSTY” MCNEILL: Co-founder and deejay, Dublab.com. Musician. Performed at Tonalism at Under Spring, 2007.

RICHARD MONTOYA: Actor, writer, member of Culture Clash. Emcee at Under Spring Optimists’ Breakfast, 2009.

RICHARD NIELSEN: Artist. Team member, Metabolic Studio.

ADOLFO V. NODAL: President, City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Commission. Team member, Metabolic Studio.

KAREN NOGUES: Fashion designer and activist, neighborhood resident.

OGURI: Butoh dancer, choreographer, conductor of Body Weather Laboratory. Performed at Under Spring various times, 2006–2009.

ED PORTER: Artist. Exhibited sculpture at Under Spring, 2007.

ED P. REYES: City Councilmember for the First Council District, Los Angeles. Speaker at Under Spring Optimists’ Breakfast, 2009.

RICAN: The graffiti name of a local esidentr and L.A. native.

JORGE LUIS RODRIGUEZ: Area resident, briefly lived underneath the Spring Street Bridge.

ROSMELIA RODRIGUEZ: Security guard at Under Spring.

SERGIO RODRIGUEZ JR.: Former graffiti artist. Los Angeles resident.

JAMES ROJAS: Project Manager, Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Founder, Latino Urban Forum. Speaker at Farmlab Public Salon Series, 2008.

YUVAL RON: Composer, musician. Performed at Under Spring, 2007. DRAMATIS PERSONAE xxiii

AUTUMN ROONEY: Team member, Farmlab.

ROSA: The first name of a longtime area resident and Belmont High School graduate.

GERARDO VAQUERO ROSAS: Former South Central Farmer. Staff member, ValleyCrest Landscape Development. Team member, Metabolic Studio.

ROXANNE STEINBERG: Co-founder and dancer, Body Weather Laboratory. Team member, Metabolic Studio.

DEBORAH SZEKELY: Health spa pioneer. Speaker at Under Spring Optimists’ Breakfast, 2009.

KAREN TAYLOR: Bride at wedding held at Under Spring, 2008.

NICK TAYLOR: Groom at wedding held at Under Spring, 2008.

TOKER: Artist. Crew member, Hit + Run. Farmlab Public Salon workshop co- leader, 2008.

ARTEMIO TORRES: Security-guard-company owner, security guard at Under Spring.

IRENE TSATSOS: Gallery director and chief curator, Armory Center for the Arts. Team member, Farmlab.

ANTONIO VELASQUEZ: Security guard at Under Spring.

MATIAS VIEGENER: Faculty member, California Institute for the Arts. Co- founder, Fallen Fruit. Speaker at Farmlab Public Salon Series, 2007.

FABIAN WAGMISTER: Faculty member, UCLA. Under Spring neighbor. Owner of the Raphael Junction Block Building, a Historic-Cultural Monument.

GEORGE YU: Executive Director, Chinatown (Los Angeles) Business Improvement District. Speaker, Under Spring Optimists’ Breakfast, 2009.

ROGER ZEPEDA: Local resident and L.A. native. 1 UNDER 1 SPRING A marginalized space…Homelessness…Drugs…A week’s cleaning…Rescuing destitute places…The meaning of this place… Infrastructural crossroads…Where the village Yangna was…A concrete river…Planters and mobile gardens…Civic pageantry… From art project to public space…A source of inspiration

MANUEL CASTELLS: I was struck by a very small graffiti I found on the wall of a semi-abandoned building [nearby]—a warehouse that was not used. And the graffiti said, “This is God’s most destitute place on earth.” That instant, I realized that any attempt to re-create life—urban life, social life, vegetation life—in this place would be a triumph against adversity and against destitution.

MARCO KUSUMAWIJAYA: It reminds me of lots of places where cities originated, and became derelict, abandoned like this, all over the world. I think it somehow sadly reminds us of the fact that we move away and away and away from the origins of these cities. 2 UNDER SPRING

MATTHEW COOLIDGE: One of the great forces at Under Spring is the crossroads it represents. With the river, the railway, and the roadway all crisscrossing one another right at that point, it’s like some kind of axis mundi for the city, with all these layers of conveyance, with the historical river, with trains representing another era of development in the west, and then the roadways being built on top of all that. You’ve got all those things layered up on top of each other right there in kind of a fulcrum.

JOE LINTON: The area’s really close to the earliest account of the river. It’s about a half mile downstream from the confluence of the L.A. River and the Arroyo Seco. In 1769, the Portola Expedition came through here from Spain and they encountered sage and wild roses and tall sycamores and oaks, and lots of fresh free-flowing water.

CINDI ALVITRE: It’s no accident, it’s no coincidence that the Farmlab, the Metabolic Studio, the transformation, the coming together of people, has happened here. Because this is within the area where the village site of Yangna was. And Yangna was a village that traveled with the L.A. River before the river was confined with cement.

LAUREN BON: We’re in a kind of accidental space that is carved out by property. We’ve got warehouses on our left. We’ve got a walled-in kind of brownfield on our right. We’ve got infrastructure for L.A. behind you. And behind me we have some warehouses. We have bridge pylons over our heads. So we kind of have a structure that was a house for people really living at the edge of the edge. Anything could happen here.

RICHARD MONTOYA: I was texting a friend, saying, “Hey I’m underneath the Spring Street Bridge, right next to the railroad tracks, and it’s kinda cold.” And he goes, “My God, are you in Guantanamo?” UNDER SPRING 3

ANTHONY ADAMS: We called this place “The Tombs” ’cause it was like being underground. It was like a coffin, but it was a coffin where you could hide.

SHEILA LEVRANT DE BRETTEVILLE: It was really forgotten space.

DENNIS BAXTER: I’d like to call it a cave, but it’s not a cave.

BILL CLOSE: The architecture of the bridge is sort of like these ancient ruins, almost.

MATTHEW COOLIDGE: When things don’t have a designated function, anything else can occur.

RICAN: Got in a couple of fights out here. With other graff[iti] writers, you know. Got chased by the cops out here. Never got caught, thank God.

ROGER ZEPEDA: Back then there was no fence so we could just walk to the river. And there were a couple of fights. Maybe I’ve seen, like, one shooting, but I wasn’t involved.

PRINCE HALL: I happened to see a man laying right there. Hey man, I look at him good and I walked around the block. Walked around the corner and I came back this way again, and I look at him good again. Brother wasn’t with us no more.

MATTHEW COOLIDGE: Under Spring is a great example of a kind of marginalized space, a space that is traditionally and historically and mythically associated with the “outsider” and the “other.”

PRINCE HALL: Somebody hit him in the face. They hit him with something like an axe or something and dumped him right here. Yeah, there’s been some action.

SHEILA LEVRANT DE BRETTEVILLE: I don’t think anyone at the [nearby Woman’s] Building used this outside place. I think women would’ve felt vulnerable here.

ROSA: I would just run with my dog, but with my friends, we’d just go and hide under the side of this one right here, or the other bridge. 4 UNDER SPRING

SARAH MCCABE: There’s a story about a ghost.

ARTEMIO TORRES: I’m in charge of security [at Under Spring]. We used to get a visit from a little girl’s spirit. It’s been about two or three months that she hasn’t come.

ANTONIO VELASQUEZ: I saw a girl, a blonde girl, about five years old, wearing a plaid dress. I didn’t want to say anything.

ARTEMIO TORRES: It’s a little girl, twelve years old, dressed in white. We don’t know who she is but she wanders the front area of the bridge.

ARTEMIO TORRES: You feel, like, a presence—like someone’s watching you—and you feel things and you turn around and look and all you see is the little shadow running away.

ROSMELIA RODRIGUEZ: She doesn’t let herself be seen, but she’ll move so that we notice that she is present.

ARTEMIO TORRES: Sometimes when I come and do the security, I’ll sit back on my chair, relax, and I feel her touching my shoulder. I just kind of put my hand down and say, “Hey, relax, go play a while.”

ANTHONY ADAMS: This area was actually a retreating spot from the neighborhood [where] we used to hang out. When the police would raid us, we would come here because it was safe here. The trains would come by. And then you could go down to the river—they didn’t have these fences here.

GEORGE YU: I don’t know how many of you have actually been to this exact spot, all those years ago, when it was impassable. It was one of the few places where I would be afraid to get out of my car. I’ve taken photos and sent them to elected officials, LAPD, asking, “How do we clean this area up?”

ARTEMIO TORRES: When I first started, the location was in very bad shape. The people would—it was terrible—they would burn the floor with fire. UNDER SPRING 5

ADOLFO V. NODAL: The space was, like, a drive-through for drug dealing. There were a couple of lean-tos in here, built up. People had been living here for a little while. There was a big, big black spot in the middle space where there had been a big fire.

PRINCE HALL: When I got here there was another fella living here, too. He had a trailer up and underneath the bridge. It had a wooden fence come around like that. It was a nice little setup.

ANTHONY ADAMS: In the nineties we started seeing one or two homeless people. But then in the 2000s we started seeing a whole lotta homeless people down here, maybe fifteen. They actually made this a shelter. They had big cardboard boxes, wood, tents—on both sides—and they made their own homes.

LAUREN BON: This used to be a pretty interesting community of homeless people. And there were chicken coops here, and there were trash piles. They were fairly organized people, and they were quite friendly. They didn’t harass me for being here or anything, and I just really was aware I was in a special kind of place.

FABIAN WAGMISTER: It wasn’t very dense in terms of people. I think usually there would be about between six and eight people living there at any given time, with probably about three or four in control of the situation. They actually had quite a pretty private, special place.

ROXANNE STEINBERG: We drove around and drove back down; this seemed like a very long, dark alley, and we happened upon what seemed like somebody’s living room. I remember a short fence, and I remember it being kind of like one of those garden fences, a short white picket fence.

ROXANNE STEINBERG: We apologized for intruding on their territory. It was really like a whole different world. It felt like I was in a different country. 6 UNDER SPRING

SERGIO RODRIGUEZ JR.: I used to come here when I was an active graffiti writer—’95, ’96, around that time. Mostly what you would see was where a bunch of homeless people were living. I’m not saying it’s bad, but I’m just saying it was mostly deteriorating. All you could see was fire burning on the walls, buckets, abandoned cars.

PRINCE HALL: We had one right here, he would always set the place on fire. Then he’d turn around, he’d rebuild. And then he set it on fire again. He was out of control.

ADOLFO V. NODAL: This guy with a needle in his arm was sitting there, sort of looking at us and nodding off. Eventually, we [helped] that guy [get] to Mexico, back to his family. We [helped him get into a] methadone program and then to Mexico.

MATIAS VIEGENER: There’s a long history now in the United States of artists and art organizations recuperating neglected industrial spaces and repurposing them. Rather than tearing down and starting from scratch and building spaces that are specifically designed for art. And I think that—broadly—that’s a very powerful and important movement. It has ecological considerations, but it also makes us think about the city overall as a site for something, and suddenly the site itself can become something you can look at the way you look at art.

SALVADOR BAUTISTA: It took about a week to do the cleaning. There were five of us with a tractor and four forty-cubic-yard containers. We had to use a forklift also, so we could reach high, so we could get closer with a pressure washer.

SARAH MCCABE: I remember watching everything being washed and cleaned, and these giant washing machines coming out and spraying down everything. And that’s when you could actually stand out there without having this horrible smell and kind of go, oh, this is interesting.

SALVADOR BAUTISTA: The floor was all black pavement. It all began with building a stage and painting over that. Three years we’ve been here. We’ve painted probably, like, three different colors—it depends on the event that is coming. UNDER SPRING 7

MANUEL CASTELLS: This site in general, and Los Angeles in particular, is so full of destitute people and destitute places that the effort to rescue these destitute places and regenerate them is probably one of the most crucial projects [for] a new city and a new kind of society. Because we have made too much use of a policy of scorched lands in our cities. We’ll call it a disposable city. You use it and you throw it away.

ANTHONY ADAMS: They’re tearing everything down. This is the last place where you still get the feeling of Los Angeles—one of the last places. And where you still have this brick building over here—they’re tearing down all the brick buildings and they’re building cinder block, cement, stucco, you know? And it’s stealing Los Angeles. Los Angeles is not Los Angeles no more. But here, you can still come down here where you see broken pavement and brick buildings.

LAUREN BON: At the edge of the railway tracks that run to Union Station, at the edge of the L.A. River that runs to Long Beach, right by the Alameda Corridor across from the State Park, right by Downtown L.A., Elysian Park—we were really at the edge of living in the middle of this incredibly multi-nodal metropolis.

MANUEL CASTELLS: To take back what we threw away, which three centuries ago was fertile land and a century ago was still a community place—and it’s so close to the heart of Downtown Los Angeles but at the same time it’s like a constellation away. I think the meaning of this place is about being a place that is still there, when it has been phased out of its right to exist as a place.

ERNESTO DE LA LOZA: We used to come up to Elysian Park; we used to go downtown to Broadway, to the cinemas that were palaces. I use bridges as great metaphors. These bridges helped me define my life. When I crossed these bridges it was meaningful, ’cause I had purpose. 8 UNDER SPRING

FABIAN WAGMISTER: I happen to be the owner with my family of a building at 1635 North Spring, which is about a block and a half from the North Spring Bridge. It’s a historical building, [it was] there in 1890, as one of the first icehouses in Los Angeles. And it’s an important building in that it really was the first large industrial building in northeast Downtown.

JOHN E. FISHER: [By 1912] there were [concrete] bridges that spanned the Los Angeles and Arroyo Seco rivers: the York Boulevard Bridge, the North Broadway Bridge nearby, and the North Main Street Bridge. There were a few other bridges that spanned, but they were wooden trestle bridges and less substantial.

FABIAN WAGMISTER: In some of the floods of the 1890s and the 1910s, both of the bridges, the Spring Bridge and the Broadway Bridge, were completely destroyed.

PRINCE HALL: See that [sidewalk imprint] right there? “The Western Construction Company”? They did the bridge in 1928 to ’29. And then they got the inspector’s name on there too: “J. G. Reel, Inspector.”

JOHN E. FISHER: Look at the bronze plate on the other side, where there is no sidewalk. Now that’s bronze, but it’s been spray-painted over. It says “North Spring Street, George E. Cryer, Mayor.” Then it lists the members of the Board of Public Works and the members of the City Council.

JOHN E. FISHER: In a very short period, from 1925 to 1932, an amazing fifteen bridges were built over the L.A. River and the Arroyo Seco. That’s a lot in such a very short time, and that was probably the biggest public works project undertaken in the city—to rebuild bridges and to build new ones to handle the growth of L.A. and the growth of automobiles.

JOE LINTON: It’s a bridge that’s threatened, too. The city wants to tear out the bridge and widen it by, like, forty feet. They say it’s for bikes and peds, but I think it’s really about getting more car capacity. UNDER SPRING 9

LEO LIMON: What I’ve heard, they’re going to break it open or something, to create a larger, wider avenue for traffic to go past Spring Street and park down here. Maybe if we oppose it more, they’ll build another track on top, so you have, like, a top layer, so traffic can still remain the same, or more traffic can go by, but there’ll be another level.

FABIAN WAGMISTER: I think that it’s an ill-conceived public urban project. I think it’s ultimately that engineers are into big projects—as big as possible.

JAMES ROJAS: Engineers don’t ever look at these kind of cultural, social, and comfort issues. For them it’s all about moving cars and building big things, because that’s basically what men do.

FABIAN WAGMISTER: In between the Spring Bridge and the Broadway Bridge is a really amazing area. Being at the riverbed, with those two bridges between, to me always felt like an amazing urban amphitheater.

OGURI: Under the bridge, by the levee, is actually very strong in Japan, too. It’s something magical, like the edge of the oven.

MARCO KUSUMAWIJAYA: You have a [neon] sign here, “Concrete Is Fluid.” But I think you should also say fluid is concrete, because I realize that many people do not even realize that there is a river. Because the river is not concrete, the river is not real. It’s concrete in the sense that it’s there, and it’s paved. I think it is also important to make it clear that the fluid, the river, is real.

CINDI ALVITRE: I’m gonna call the rain. I want the rain to come give us water back to the L.A. River.

ROSA: I fell in the river. The guy that picked me up, I had a crush on him. Even though I thought I was drowning, I just wanted a little bit of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, some CPR. I ended up dating him for, like, four weeks. Then his girlfriend came back. 10 UNDER SPRING

ANTHONY ADAMS: Sometimes we would actually go swimmin’ in it. One time we had a friend of ours—everybody knows her—and she was pretty cool and she actually got naked. Yeah, she got naked and she went down in there. That night I realized how beautiful she was.

OGURI: River is everywhere in Japan, a small island country, inlets, is little subterranean. So Japan island is at least nine-tenths on the river, so river is very familiar for me. This is kind of my childhood playground, whenever you want to do some fireworks or play baseball.

TOKER: I like what I see now. Just planters everywhere. I see pomegranates, I see flowers, I see vegetables, cactus, agave. It’s really cool. It’s very nice and fresh, airy. You almost forget that you’re under a bridge in an industrial area. Trains in the background. Electric wires in the distance. Electric towers in the distance.

JANET OWEN DRIGGS: Farmlab created F.L.A.G., the Farmlab Agbin Garden, a large community garden that is mobile. What else have we done? The Junker Gardens, which are garden plots inside our junk cars.

GERARDO VAQUERO ROSAS: This garden that I work on is a garden on wheels or a garden that is movable because it’s all in bins. The bins are on the sidewalk and this changes everything and beautifies the place. Maybe there are gardens like this elsewhere but I don’t think so.

ROXANNE STEINBERG: Every time I come out here it’s like a whole different world. And if I look back at the pictures, I can’t believe how desolate it was when we first started here, because it feels so rich and inviting—and beautiful. It really is like a park.

LAUREN BON: There’s been dance, there’ve been puppets, there’ve been parties, we’ve had square dancing. So we’ve brought a real sense of civic pageantry to this spot. UNDER SPRING 11

MATIAS VIEGENER: The way I understand art is it’s not just something that’s about the intention of an artist. It’s about the intention of the viewer—that you come to something and you examine it a certain way. And I think a space like this engages all of those issues. It makes you examine the urban space in a [new] way.

OLIVIA CHUMACERO: We’re bringing cultures together so that we can find a common space, a common place to come and understand. It’s protected and yet it’s out in the open air. It has that essence. It makes you feel comfortable.

PAUL BACA: The space developed from just being an art project into a public gathering.

JANET OWEN DRIGGS: The question of how you define public space is an interesting one. Do we mean by that a space where anybody can come at any time completely free of charge? That’s generally taken to be what a public space is.

ARI KLETZKY: I’m looking a lot at the role of privately owned versus publicly owned property. The question of ownership to me is very interesting. One’s not superior to the other. Privately owned public space isn’t inferior or superior to publicly owned public space.

KAREN NOGUES: It’s amazing what this place attracts. It’s beyond a zoo! It’s very rare to get this opportunity—and it’s free.

ADOLFO V. NODAL: This particular space—Under Spring—is a place that is now ready for public use. With the Metabolic Studio upgrade of it, the much-needed public connections from the State Park to the river, the eventual upgrade of the North Spring Street Bridge—it has intense political focus [because of] its urban design issues. What we have done is to shine a light on it.

ROXANNE STEINBERG: All of a sudden I felt like we were sitting in some Greek amphitheater and eating grapes from vines. Having these formal meetings and then somehow being able just to remind ourselves that we’re really under a bridge in Downtown Los Angeles is just a very magical chance that we have. 12 UNDER SPRING

ADOLFO V. NODAL: This place was not unique in this city or nationally—there are lots of underpasses, cul-de-sacs and traffic triangles. All absurd and eminently creative spaces.

YUVAL RON: The limitation of the space restricts you to going one direction and not the other direction. Stravinsky said, “Limitation is the source for creativity.”

ANTHONY ADAMS: Right here, you guys got this tree trunk upside down—I have a tree trunk that I found in an alley. Because of this, I put that tree trunk in my backyard.

GERARDO VAQUERO ROSAS: I plant in other places in the Downtown area. Underneath another bridge, I found some small areas that the cement does not cover. I went and threw some flower seeds and they came up here and there. I go around doing this.

PAUL BACA: Some of the people were here for the mass transportation day; they started thinking like, “Hey this is a great idea.” And they loved interacting so much that one of the individuals said, “You know, I should just open up my garage as a place to work on bikes and I’ll buy some cheap Mexican pastry and some coffee and stuff.”

ALEJANDRO COHEN: [People] come up to us and say, “Oh, I have this band to play there and this band to play there.” Almost treating it like a venue—and it’s not really a venue to me. It’s not something where you can do a monthly club. It’s a thing that you have to find that special artist—that special moment—to do something that will really combine well. It’s not, “Hey, let’s just bring a couple of speakers and have a cheesy rave night under the bridge.” That would destroy the place.

NICK TAYLOR: More than once since coming to Farmlab, we talked about the Talking Heads lyric: “Once there were parking lots, now it’s a peaceful oasis.”

ALEJANDRO COHEN: I’m so proud to be part of the things we did there because I feel we’ve respected the space and we brought it new life, instead of just degrading [it]. UNDER SPRING 13

KAREN TAYLOR: We bought a house and the backyard was all paved except for where [an] avocado tree broke out of the ground. So we broke out the concrete and are repurposing it. We took out our front lawn and are building a four-by-ten-foot raised vegetable bed. And then mulching most of the yard, putting in a patio and using the concrete to build a table and a wall and all kinds of things, and leaving open space for fruit trees.

LAUREN BON: This is really a no-man’s-land. And as such I think it’s already, before anything happened, a place for art in the city of L.A. in the same way that East Berlin was ten years ago, where the scar of the wall was. It’s just a fantastically live location. 2 THE 15 TOMBS Freedom from everything…A retreat spot…Divided turf…Where the refinery was…We’d play our music loud…You kind of get the chills…Tagging and street art

Before Metabolic Studio transformed the space beginning in 2006, the area under the Spring Street Bridge exhibited familiar features and patterns of other marginalized American spaces: young people found an unsupervised place to gather, where they were often accompanied only by homeless populations, which swelled and shrank with fluctuating economic conditions and police attentiveness; graffiti—from gang and crew tags to intricately rendered murals—appeared and disappeared in cycles 16 UNDER SPRING

of expression and suppression. The space was on the west bank of the L.A. River, and it didn’t belong to an obvious neighborhood; it inhabited a twilight zone between what some consider the city’s demographic divide between Eastside and Westside, between residential and industrial spaces, between city and railroad and river. Some remember the space as a haven, others as a haunted or threatening place beyond authorities’ notice or control.

ANTHONY ADAMS: You hear the helicopter? You hear ’em all day long in the neighborhood where we came from—they call it Temple Street. It’s an old neighborhood. It’s almost a hundred years old. It’s been around for a long, long time. Anyways, in the neighborhood, when they would raid, first the cops would come, the helicopter, and cops would be runnin’ all over the place. But they would park their cars maybe a block or two away, and the helicopter—you knew it was lookin’ because it would have the spotlight, so people would get in the cars and we’d go, “Let’s go meet at the Tombs….” So we would come and we would park our car on the side over here. We would come park, bring our car all the way to this dead end here or pull ’em up in here, and one of us would turn the radio kinda loud and the cops never came here. Nobody ever came here really, and then the only people that were here were the homeless people, so we would hang out here in the Tombs and drink beer and have girls with us, or we would go kick it down here at the L.A. River. We’d go hang out down there and just have a lot of fun, and it was a freedom from everything: from the violence, the gang violence, the predators—I mean the gang killers, the guys that go out and kill other boys—the police, the beatings by the police, just all kinda madness. THE TOMBS 17

ERNESTO DE LA LOZA: [This is a] divided gang turf area. You got Eastside Clover, the Avenues, Hazard Grande, and Dog Town [Rifa]. These were perilous areas for us ’cause we were Mexican, Mexican-Americans, so you had to know where your boundaries were.

LEO LIMON: I do remember “Clover” and “Dog Town” written on the walls because of the local youth groups—the YGs—being on both sides of the river. Yet again, they weren’t really at each other’s necks.

ANTHONY ADAMS: Different gangs used to come here, but they didn’t come all the time so it wasn’t nobody’s permanent area. So you had a mixture of West Los Angeles and East Los Angeles gangs coming here, but as far as coming constantly— no. That’s why they didn’t really run into each other.

JOHNEL LANGERSTON: The river is a crossing point for gangs. You got Dog Town on one side. Clover, Lincoln [Heights]. A lot of them dudes go down there [to the river] to tag. They wanna leave a legacy for themselves in this environment. And if they get caught by another gang down there, it’s gonna be some drama.

RUBEN HERNANDEZ: Ask any kid the name of at least one gang; he won’t tell you one. He’ll tell you five that just circle around this area.

SHEILA LEVRANT DE BRETTEVILLE: Lincoln Heights was a vibrant community with lively and bloodthirsty gangs. But they never gave us any trouble [at the Woman’s Building, a feminist arts organization that relocated to North Spring Street in 1975].

SERGIO RODRIGUEZ JR.: Lincoln Heights, it’s mostly known as gang territory. So you kind of risk it coming in here. So that’s why there wasn’t that much graff.

PRINCE HALL: [People who came here] were cool, you know what I mean? They would come around and just—they conversating and always talking. Sometime it be thirty or forty of ’em and all, you know what I mean, sometime Spanish, sometime Asian. They respected me. Come around and have a good time, and it’s peaceful. They were good, man. But everybody—everybody would come in. 18 UNDER SPRING

ANTHONY ADAMS: A lot of the Eastside neighborhoods were afraid of this neighborhood here, so they actually stayed away from hanging out. If they did, they came to just fight or whatever.

PRINCE HALL: Neutral. It’s neutral. It’s neutral territory.

ROSA: There’s a rival gang that lives in this area. And so we didn’t wanna get seen by them. And then the high schools—Lincoln High versus Belmont High School—we didn’t wanna get involved in that. So we parked a little bit further down and [if someone was coming] then we would run out this way or that way. So I guess basically towards the back of this building.

ERNESTO DE LA LOZA: [This was] a line of demarcation. We had to beware. ’Cause there was a lot of drive-bys, a lot of conflict. We weren’t from East L.A. People [like my family] migrated and they embraced the opportunities, and they became homeowners, became middle-class families. But there’s the beast of it. [Others] were envious.

JOHNEL LANGERSTON: [This] bridge and [this] river is the meeting ground for that violence. This is why I bought this building [on N. Main Street] next to the bridge. Because this is where they come to become certified gang members.

ANTHONY ADAMS: The gang writing started coming out more in the nineties. In the eighties it was very little. If it was, it was so old. It’d been there twenty, thirty years. But in 2000 everything just was changing. Like, you turn on the light and the cockroaches go all over the place; well, that’s what happened in Los Angeles. They were building up these brand new bright buildings, and everybody was going to hide—the youth and the homeless.

ROSA: These are some of our places we used to ditch school and liked to just watch the trains and the river go by. THE TOMBS 19

ROSA: We would come and park the cars. We had ’64 Chevys, ’67 Impalas, ’52 Fleetlines. I mean, they were bombs and stuff. And it was 1975—’74 and ’75—and we would just cram into these cars. I don’t know, seven, eight kids are in one Chevy Impala and we’d come over here and we’d ditch with the guys. Football players are here and we’re like, “Okay, we gotta get back to school pretty soon ’cause you guys gotta run.”

PRINCE HALL: Hey, you’d be surprised who you would see around here sleeping, man. Especially if they were driving some distance and had to go somewhere and would go to rest, man. Can’t drive a truck, man, sleeping. Can’t drive nothing sleeping.

LEO LIMON: Back in the sixties I remember coming down here and the train is passing by. Just coming on a bike and looking around, smoking a number, enjoying the atmosphere. There were transients, cars, and I think there was an old factory that used to be down here also.

ANTHONY ADAMS: The last time I came down here was ’83. And this has always been a retreating spot for hiding, just to get away from everything. And it was a mill. The smell back then? It was just regular. I mean, what it smells like right now—oil, smoke, you know, from the trains.

SHEILA LEVRANT DE BRETTEVILLE: Standard Oil of California had a great deal of presence.

PRINCE HALL: That land over there is where the refinery was. It was nice too, man, because during the wintertime, the tanks would block off the wind. You couldn’t feel the breeze for them tanks. And then they started cutting the tanks down. I said, “Hey man, next winter’s gonna be mean.”

PRINCE HALL: Them tanks wasn’t there and sure enough, man, everybody gotta bundle up now. But those tanks—they had at least ten or twelve of ’em. Not no small ones. Huge tanks. 20 UNDER SPRING

ROGER ZEPEDA: My first time, I guess, was when my friends came to smoke. Little by little we started getting into the writing. So everybody got more into the writing and less into the smoking, so that’s kind of a good thing, I guess.

TOKER: I was here years ago. I don’t remember much but it was a very concrete art studio, dark, a late-night party. Random deejays, people were hanging, milling, out under the bridge, but it was mostly people being indoors late at night. But they’d come out and hang out. I remember it was pitch black. If I remember anything, pitch black. Which I like, being a black man myself.

ANTHONY ADAMS: There would be homeless people here and they kinda liked just havin’ us here ’cause we’d play our music loud.

ROSA: We would just hang out right there and, oh, be in trouble the next day with my mom.

ROGER ZEPEDA: We exploded a lot of cans once, because I guess some guy just had left them, so we just put them in a box. My friend got the idea of just lighting them up. They really blew up. For, like, a good fifteen minutes just standing next to it, nothing happened. We take a few steps back and I just hear a big explosion. A can almost hit me in the back of the head.

ANTHONY ADAMS: Most of those people that I came with from the eighties until now are mostly all of them dead. Yeah mostly all of them have been killed with gang violence or got life. The block I lived on, there were seven Mexican families and all those families are gone. I’m the last one left.

JOHNEL LANGERSTON: Why is [another local business] building getting tore up the most? They don’t tag my building. But they tag the mess out of him. That’s ’cause he got gates around and not giving no love. Open the doors and invite these kids in. Teach them a trade. Give them responsibility to understand.

ROGER ZEPEDA: I heard a story supposedly that a guy hung himself. I don’t know about that. I came by and the streets were closed but I never seen the body. THE TOMBS 21

ANTHONY ADAMS: I came down here with about three friends—two girls and another guy—and we came down here; and we had just lost a friend—a real good friend of ours—and we came down here and we were listening to oldies and we were sad and we were reminiscing about our friend that had just got killed. It was a trip that night—ended up turning out really, really good, you know? We just kicked it here listening to music, oldies, Mary Wells, Intruders, and watching the trains go by and we said, “Life is too precious to let it go behind because of predators, you know?” It was just—it was beautiful. It was a eye-opener. I mean, to really see things, you gotta get a bird’s-eye view, and to get a bird’s-eye view it has to be a retreat, and this was our retreat.

JOHNEL LANGERSTON: It can work. It can be a kid growing up in this community getting straight As and not tripping on going to no river to join no gang to prove their manhood. These two [employees sitting with him] are examples.

ANTHONY ADAMS: I’ve experienced the real pressure out here. See my neck? A bullet hole. A gunshot wound to my throat. I’ve been shot—four different times. I’ve lost three brothers…out of four of us, three of my blood brothers. I’ve got stepbrothers, but my blood brothers have all been killed. So the Tombs was our haven.

ARTEMIO TORRES: There are certain areas of the bridge, when you pass by them, you kind of get chills.

ARTEMIO TORRES: A fire truck came once, about three o’clock on a Sunday afternoon. There was a call that a lady here was injured. The call came from inside our building. And they think it was the little girl [a ghost] who reported that. 22 UNDER SPRING

ARTEMIO TORRES: On another occasion, it was one in the morning, a cop came down from the [top of the] bridge. The cop said he saw the little girl make the turn on the bridge, coming down towards us. I was on guard. And he was like, “Hey, where’s the little girl?” I said, “What girl?” He said, “Where’s the mother? Aren’t you the security? The little girl who turned here. Where’s the mom?” He thought I did something to the mom or something. More cops came—six, seven. Helicopters came. And they searched all around and they didn’t find anything.

OLIVIA CHUMACERO: There was a suicide attempt.

RAMON MACIAS: Everybody was just screaming, and that’s why I, like, got out, and that’s when I looked at the guy.

SALVADOR BAUTISTA: He was yelling something, and he just jumped off the bridge into the river. And after that, somebody called 911 and the police came and an ambulance.

RAMON MACIAS: He went into the river. I think he jumped, fell, or somebody pushed him. I don’t know. I’m not sure. They put him in a bag, [lifted him onto the bridge], put him in the ambulance and went to the hospital. I think he lived.

ROXANNE STEINBERG: Jamie Oliver, the Naked Chef, and his television crew were filming a feature at Homegirl Café and Homeboy Industries, just up the street. They wanted a place to have a picnic for the staff there and for their own production team. They asked to hold it at Under Spring.

FABIAN DEBORA: [The Jamie Oliver video crew] already had film of that location—the Farmlab. But it was time for B-roll. I took them around City Terrace, different areas of L.A. And I took them into the river.

RUBEN HERNANDEZ: One of my close friends was—well, we had a feud so we kind of, like, separated. But I grew up with him since we were like seven.

FABIAN DEBORA: The L.A. River is usually a peaceful place for me. And the day when we get there, I’m happy, I’m doing [location] scouting, showing them the river. THE TOMBS 23

RUBEN HERNANDEZ: When he turned eighteen—when I got jumped in, I told him I didn’t wanna get into the gang. I didn’t wanna be involved. So he got mad and pulled out a gun.

FABIAN DEBORA: We were underneath the Sixth Street Bridge tunnel that takes us into the L.A. River.

RUBEN HERNANDEZ: About two weeks later or a week later, they found his body with six shots in his chest.

FABIAN DEBORA: And at the distance I see this, and I’m saying, “Oh my God, is that a body?” But to me it’s not making as much of an impact as it is to the people from London. For me it’s like, okay, it’s a dead body, you know. And they were getting all like, “Oh, should we leave now?” I said, “No, no, no.” Somewhere out there this person has a mother and father who would love for their son to be discovered.

RUBEN HERNANDEZ: And he was lying in the L.A. River.

FABIAN DEBORA: I start getting closer. I’m familiar with the river. I start walking in, roll up my pants legs. I get closer, to confirm that the guy was dead and drowned. It’s amazing ’cause as I’m walking in the water and I get near him, they can feel this impact of energy—like, stay back, you know?

FABIAN DEBORA: I called the police automatically. They came and they started doing forensics. See if the individual jumped [into] the river? Or just to see what happened. So they’re coming up with different alternatives: He must have overdosed? Or he must have been drunk? Or maybe he floated from Glendale because the night before it was heavy rains and the river was up?

FABIAN DEBORA: He didn’t have no gunshots. He didn’t have no stab wounds. And he didn’t have no busted head like he did a jump. So they’re thinking it’s either he came down the riverbed, hit his head, and drowned or he floated in from whatever area. 24 UNDER SPRING

LEO LIMON: You’re seeing a whole lot more writing than back in the fifties and sixties.

ROGER ZEPEDA: Writing. Back then it wasn’t a big deal. Now I guess it’s a federal offense.

PRINCE HALL: I’ve seen taggers of all ages, all colors, all everybody going down into the river. They walk right past ya with a bucket of paint. You could see it man, it was a lot of activity.

SERGIO RODRIGUEZ JR.: Big pieces, everything. Colorful, all out, big blocks, whatever. Right now it’s just like black, silver, and tags here and there. But back there you would see like pieces, crew pieces, like crew spell outs, stuff like that.

PRINCE HALL: They would come out with these ladders, man. They would have ladders on the cars, so they get up and paint way up there so the people couldn’t paint over it, you know. See how that says “Manny, 1994”?

LEO LIMON: The difference today? Extreme. There’s no comparison. There was the cholo, the scribbler—real simple stuff. The “I love Lucy,” “Johnny loves Maria,” what have you. Real simple stuff. Now, they’re out. They have talent. They have sketchbooks. They want to imitate art, they want to imitate life, they want to imitate culture. What I see out here is just the variety of expressions. And that’s cool. But watch out youngster, there’s a train coming by. And watch out, there’s someone looking at you who wants to get you and punish you for doing this. And that’s wrong. That’s totally wrong.

ROGER ZEPEDA: Before we could come, just walk down here, and then coming back up, we had to take our time, because usually cops would always know that we were done, so they’d be waiting for us right there down under the bridge. They chased us a few times so we had to run across that way. THE TOMBS 25

RICAN: They used to call me “Rican” or “TNT”—“The Nation’s Top.” I used to write under the bridge, by the river, on train tracks. You know, used to piece up a wall. Most of that stuff got kinda buffed out by the city, I guess. And then other people come, write over it.

ANTHONY ADAMS: Most of those kids, I call ’em “five to sevens.” The reason why is because most of them are under eighteen and they come out tryin’ to make a name for themselves, and they write all along the trains and they go home before their mom and dad gets home from work.

RICAN: My homie, yeah, we didn’t want to get burnt. But we did one, I believe on the other side of the track. You know, said “TNT” and inside of that we drew a Puerto Rican flag. It looked pretty nice, it’s pretty clean, even though it was up there only for like maybe a day or two. It took us a couple hours to do it.

SERGIO RODRIGUEZ JR.: People were just walking through the tracks and going to the L.A. River. And mostly what you would see was graffiti everywhere. I mean, I’m a graffiti artist, so of course I’m going to come here and say, “Okay, I’m going to put my name on here.” Actually one of my spots was right here on the door. Not the door, but the gate. I had my name spelled out. And then my other friend was on the other gate.

RICAN: Right here would be the perfect spot, so just hit it real quick. And just hop the fence, you know, just jump into the train tracks. Access to the river.

LEO LIMON: So what’s here, it’s beautiful. There’s no comparison. There’s a lot of paint up there and there’s a lot of wasted paint by the powers that be to paint it over, where they go, “The problem is solved.” What problem? It’s not a problem. It’s how to work with it so that it continues to grow and flourish, L.A. being the mural capital of the United States. Now it’s just being abated? Why spend $10 million in doing this? Why don’t you spend $2 million in buying the spray guns, the generators. 26 UNDER SPRING

JOE LINTON: When the Gold Line [subway] opened there, [County Supervisor] Gloria Molina wanted to make sure that all the graffiti was painted out, and so we [City Councilmember Ed Reyes’s staff] worked with her office and the Army Corps of Engineers and they were able to find some funding and went and painted out all the graffiti that you could see within the viewshed of the Gold Line trains in that area.

LEO LIMON: Have them come out here. Really professional stuff. Air brushes. And really creative stuff that’s just mind-blowing. So that the youngsters that come in the future will look at it and go, “What’s all this? Wow, this is fantastic!” Now you look out there where they’ve abated areas and you see patches. Just patches. It gives me ideas to do something in those patches. You know, it’s like a base they put down. Why not just outline it and do something in there? This is Patch Town now. Stop patching up what you call a problem.

JOHN E. FISHER: [Examining the bridge’s topside.] This looks like spray paint that was put here to match the concrete color. I think they also painted the streetlights. This is the original concrete, but I think it was painted a concrete color because I think there was graffiti here. And that’s one of the realities of the twenty-first century that we didn’t have back when this was built—the graffiti problem.

SERGIO RODRIGUEZ JR.: Now I think they take care of it every month or every week, they go buffing. That’s the only thing that’s changed—that they’re catching up with the writers and buffing it.

JOHN E. FISHER: I haven’t really seen any graffiti recently on these bridges, so it’s nice to see that people are respecting these structures.

PRINCE HALL: I was sittin’ over there in the corner and the light from the moon shine on this wall from over there, right? And I happened to look and there were four pictures on the wall right there, man. You got to put a certain light on it to see it…One of ’em, they look like, how can I say it? They look like some ancient Roman. One had a hat on his head with the horns. There were four pieces, they were side by side. Yeah, you shoulda seen it. It look like gladiators, maybe like something out of the Middle Ages. THE TOMBS 27

PRINCE HALL: Somebody had painted two Fred Flintstones, two big huge Fred Flintstones. He had Dino in it. Hey, you shoulda seen it, man. It was nice, man. And when they got ready to paint it, I begged ’em not to do it, and they did it. I said, “I hope God get you for that. You shouldn’t have done that, man.” You should have seen it. Everything you would see in the Flintstones was on that wall. 3 HOMELESS29 Encampments…Collectors…Drugs…The dark spots of a city… The city would come with bulldozers…Just passing through… Extending a hand…Hobos…Riding the rails

In 2012, one estimate had America’s homeless population at more than 633,000 people. In 2011, approximately 51,340 people were thought to be homeless in Los Angeles County; 23,539 of them lived in the city of Los Angeles. During the Under Spring years—as well as before and since—one of L.A.’s most visible manifestations of the crisis of homelessness and its related crises of mental and physical illness, health care, drug abuse, economic depression, and NIMBYism was the city’s infamous and overburdened Skid Row. Located approximately two miles away from Under Spring, Skid Row was a place visitors and locals alike beheld with a gasp if they didn’t ignore it altogether. Some homeless people wanted nothing to do with Skid Row. They preferred a place out of the spotlight, a place like the area underneath the Spring Street Bridge. 30 UNDER SPRING

ERNESTO DE LA LOZA: My father wouldn’t let me come around here when I was going to school. This is where all the winos used to hang out.

LEO LIMON: It smelled like urine. There were transients sitting around, and they had left their shopping carts and things. Homelessness didn’t start in the nineties or early 2000’s, it’s been around for a long time. And people did come down here.

FABIAN WAGMISTER: There had been a very long-term, semi-stable homeless community, in that it was a very private part of the city and they had sort of transformed the lower section into, like, two or three pseudo-residential areas. Of course, there were a lot of problems, and we know all of the social problems that come along with homelessness and the lack of health, lack of hygiene, piling of trash, and a lot of other things.

ADOLFO V. NODAL: There were four or five people living here, and they were in different stages of homelessness and drug addiction.

FABIAN WAGMISTER: I think it was mostly men probably in their late forties. That’s what I remember.

DENNIS BAXTER: They were living next to the pillars, underneath the bridge.

FABIAN WAGMISTER: There were three or four evolving, changing encampments. And each one had its own sort of nature—like one would be more made of clothes and things hanging. And they all felt like some sort of semipermanent place. It wasn’t like a “just tonight” thing, or “just this week.” There was a lot of stuff piled—objects and cans and things.

PAUL BACA: People were living under there. I remember it being, like, we kid about it smelling like New York subways, but you can guess for yourself what it smelled like.

AUTUMN ROONEY: [All quotes are from her diary.] It was kind of horrifying and sad. It smelled like urine. And there were just a lot of makeshift houses, made out of like boards, and people had couches, and it looked like pretty comfortable dwellings, actually. You could tell they spent a lot of time building their homes. HOMELESS 31

MATTHEW COOLIDGE: Mythically, you’ve got the kind of marginal characters that would dwell underneath bridges—people who were cast aside by society for whatever reason and ended up finding a life underneath the bridges in these spaces that nobody cared about, and that had no designated function.

FABIAN WAGMISTER: We used to see a lot of them because to get out of there, the best way was always to come down Baker [Street]. And so they used to come with their carts down Baker, and then in through Baker. And so there were not only those who we knew were there, but there was constant traffic. And usually they were very friendly.

PRINCE HALL: I got here in 1992. In ’95, when they had to do the construction [on the bridge], they said could nobody live up underneath the bridge. So, the boss that was here gave me the place in the back. [A small indoor area where Hall resided.] And that’s how I wound up there. Yeah. I wound up better, man, it came out good. Although, the outdoors not bad.

MATTHEW COOLIDGE: [It] continues today with homeless people making the best overhead shelters they can in the urbanscape. With all the controlled private space, the overpass is quite often the only “roof” for people who can’t afford anything.

FABIAN WAGMISTER: Some of them would stop from time to time and ask us for water, or ask us if we had cans or anything to give. And sometimes we would. And of course [we] always gave them water and stuff like that if they needed it.

FABIAN WAGMISTER: A lot of them of course are collectors—whether for selling or for keeping. But because of their luck, a lot of the time they want to grab and get, and they tend to pile.

RAMON MACIAS: We found a lot of homeless, a lot of garbage, a lot of things. They burned tires and we had to wash the bridge and then throw the trash away. The people smoked weed here, and they had a lot of prostitution, a lot of sex under the bridge. 32 UNDER SPRING

FABIAN WAGMISTER: I would never witness too much drug use…I’m sure there was some going on, but it didn’t feel like a really big issue there. There was definitely not the kind of situation where there were dealers around.

ADOLFO V. NODAL: It was very, very dusty; very dirty, a musty smell in the air. The floors were caked with oil; that’s why we painted the floors. The place looked really, really run down and like a very scary ghetto. The neighbors were afraid of this area. Even the police department was happy that we actually took possession of this area.

FABIAN WAGMISTER: We used to go around there, and everybody would freak out, “Are you safe here?” There’s this thing about homeless that they’re dangerous people. They’re not any more dangerous than rich people in Beverly Hills—I really don’t feel so. Unless you bother them—you get in their territory and they’ll defend their territory like anybody else.

RAMON MACIAS: People were walking around and selling stolen things. Radios, tires, a lot of things.

JORGE LUIS RODRIGUEZ: In 2000 I received some people from Cuba and we kind of took a tour in my trailer, and we went about living around the city in the dark spots—and this was a dark one.

PRINCE HALL: Everybody would come around. And when they would come around, we made sure they got something to eat. And sometimes it was cold, they got blankets, cause they still be a lot of stuff there, right. The boss [the proprietor of a former business near Under Spring] gave ’em something to eat, man. He gave some blankets.

FABIAN WAGMISTER: I never felt threatened walking there. Other people did, but I never felt threatened, because I saw them so regularly and I knew who they were.

JORGE LUIS RODRIGUEZ: There were people sleeping all over. I remember about five camping tents and, you know, the elite of the homeless. There were sleeping bags thrown around. HOMELESS 33

FABIAN WAGMISTER: There were sort of two homeless situations taking place in our part of the world here. One was [Under Spring]. The other was this single guy. [He camped across the street, along the fence line] of the Los Angeles State Historic Park. Very close, south of Baker, that way. This guy was very interesting, he was one of those homeless that would collect and collect trash, and it was a very unhealthy situation. It’s an interesting story with him. Once we approached him, and he told us a story that basically, his mother, who was a witch, had told him he had to stay there forever, that he should never go away. And actually for a long time he resisted. We never asked for him to be removed, but State Parks started to move forward and they would come every couple weeks and take all of his trash.

PAUL BACA: During the eighties, one of the film jobs I had, [we parked our cars here]. We were shooting—a big kung-fu film. First of all, I never got paid for it, the check bounced. Secondly, I almost got shot by one of the actors, who decided to stay in character and fired the blank gun.

FABIAN WAGMISTER: He would start all over again, collecting his stuff. And it was kind of an interesting kind of installation thing going on there. I think it’s pretty clear he had some sort of mental illness. He finally one day disappeared. But he was a constant presence. He was one of those characters one gets to know every once in a while, and I’ve always wondered where he’s gone. I think for some time he lived in one of the little streets back there.

JORGE LUIS RODRIGUEZ: At night, you can’t live without fire. You have no oil, no means of getting heat anywhere. So people used to light, in big tanks, you know, kind of fires under the bridge. That was in the late eighties, in the nineties always. You could pass by even in the other side of the line and you could see the bonfires under the bridge from far away.

FABIAN WAGMISTER: For a while there was a Cuban woman with what seemed to be either her son or her lover. It wasn’t clear what he was and how they talked, or how they dealt with each other.

FABIAN WAGMISTER: Sometimes she would get very aggressive. If you didn’t give her something she would insult you. 34 UNDER SPRING

PAUL BACA: Invariably there were homeless guys living under here. And they said, “Yeah, yeah! We’ll watch your car and it’ll only cost you five bucks.”

PRINCE HALL: I lived downtown [in a single room occupancy] for a week. Yeah, I couldn’t stand that. I paid for a week. I could only stay three days. There was too much going on, bad. After, I moved and walked this way. I walked over and I was here ever since.

JORGE LUIS RODRIGUEZ: I remember I brought my trailer under here and all the homeless, all the people living here were so silent, because it was like paradise, and here comes this hotel into town.

PRINCE HALL: Yeah it’s peaceful. Only noise that you would hear mostly would be the train.

JORGE LUIS RODRIGUEZ: It’s part of the heart that you never show. Any city in the world, if you’re working, and you don’t know where to go, where do you go? You go under the bridge. So it’s a place to stay, it’s a place to disappear in the midst of the night.

ADOLFO V. NODAL: There was no fences or anything like that. If you had one too many hits of heroin and got crazy, you could walk out in front of a train, so it was a very scary, very urban, run-down place.

RAMON MACIAS: We did it. [Put a fence up.] They didn’t have a fence and then too many people got close to the tracks.

JORGE LUIS RODRIGUEZ: I remember one guy that fell down from the top of the bridge because he was too drunk. I saw him falling, coming down, like, right there. And everybody was like, “Ohhhh, he died.” No, he stood up and kept walking.

PRINCE HALL: The fella had a trailer over in the corner and he was keeping the place clean. HOMELESS 35

FABIAN WAGMISTER: Even before anything would happen with Farmlab—every couple months [city workers] would come with big bulldozers and brrruuumm, take the whole thing away. And they would start again. They would never move away.

PRINCE HALL: I’m soul searchin’. I’m looking for something. I’m not here to stay—I’m just passing through.

FABIAN WAGMISTER: At that time, besides us almost nobody was using the bridge. So there was no reason at that point to have them removed.

AUTUMN ROONEY: Carmelo [Alvarez] has adopted a homeless person, David. He is twenty-seven, from Mexico. Everyone pitched in to send him through a methadone treatment. He has been on heroin for four years, living under the Spring Street Bridge. He doesn’t speak much English.

AUTUMN ROONEY: One of the interesting things that David told Carmelo, because I don’t speak Spanish and this is all through Carmelo, he said that he paid for his heroin by recycling. So he’d spend all day collecting cans and then bring it to the recycling center. And he told him that they would often pay him with heroin instead of money.

ADOLFO V. NODAL: I got working with Carmelo to try to place these people that were here into more suitable spaces for them, and about three or four we actually were able to place. The others really just went away. They just didn’t wanna deal with it.

CARMELO ALVAREZ: Sometimes we’re reaching out, you know? You don’t have to reach out so far. You just have to extend your hand.

CARMELO ALVAREZ: [David] said, “I’ve been praying for three days for somebody to help me.” He said I wouldn’t want to help him ’cause “I’m a junkie.” And I said, “If you wanna come here, I’ll be here at six in the morning.” But before that, I got back to the office and I started looking for a rehab, a methadone program. 36 UNDER SPRING

AUTUMN ROONEY: We adopted another heroin addict, Romeo. He is a friend of David’s. He is on the methadone program, too, at AltaMed. It’s hard to think of how to help them in three months when the Dolores Mission kicks them out. It’s overwhelming. We brought them to the Dolores Mission, Father Boyle’s homeless shelter, but they’re only allowed to stay for three months.

AUTUMN ROONEY: Carmelo told me that Romeo told him that he wanted to talk to me. He wanted to give me my money back because he went back on heroin. I don’t want the money back.

AUTUMN ROONEY: Another person who lived under the bridge who didn’t really want to leave, he was unhappy about it, was named Bruce. And he had the most elaborate house under there. It had wood walls and a couch and was more—almost like a home. He didn’t want to go and he was hanging around. He had his shopping cart in the front of the building for a while, and he would wander in and threaten people. Somebody said he had a knife. Anyway, there were several months of this, and then he eventually disappeared.

CARMELO ALVAREZ: [Bruce] didn’t want rehab, so we offered to take him to a hotel and get him clothes. He said he was looking for work. Then somebody picked him up and had work for him. We gave him some money, he took it, but then the next day he came back. He wanted more. That guy actually was gonna put his hand around my neck. I’m a little guy and he was around my neck. He wanted my money. I saw him a lot, around his house. I think he got the message. He could have done that same thing as David, or everybody. It’s a matter of choice and that’s what he chose.

AUTUMN ROONEY: David is doing well. Carmelo got him into an SRO temporary transitional housing. So David made it through the whole methadone program. I think it was a month, going every day for methadone injections. And he got completely clean and he was working at Not A Cornfield and Farmlab doing odd jobs, and decided he wanted to go back home to Mexico. He hadn’t seen his family in about seven years, I think. And he had a wife and kids and a mother there. And so everybody pitched in money to have him go back down to his family. HOMELESS 37

CARMELO ALVAREZ: I took David home. There were a hundred thousand people marching—that was the [May Day, 2006] demonstration in Los Angeles, and I’m taking David back to Mexico. Once we got across the border David said, “God, you know, it’s so dirty.” I said, “David, you had bad blood inside your veins and they were gonna have to amputate!”

AUTUMN ROONEY: Today David called from Mexico. He said he went to his old house but his family had moved. His sister was still living there and sent him to his mother, who had diabetes. She moved to the country for her health. Al [Adolfo Nodal] said that when Carmelo got him to the border at TJ he got a little nervous, David did. He said he didn’t like it because it was too dusty. Al thought that was ironic because David lived under a dirty bridge for seven years. Then he said David called him from Mexico and asked for money to start a bakery.

AUTUMN ROONEY: David was the only person we were able to actually help and who was willing to be helped. I don’t know what happened to all the other people, the homeless people who lived under the bridge. They dispersed and relocated someplace else.

CARMELO ALVAREZ: You have the couple. There was a woman there. She had a cat and she also tried to move to another location. A gentleman used to come over, too. He said, “You come over after church,” ’cause he was gonna go over to church, so he come over for some spiritual guidance. He came over to praise. They chose to move out but stay mobile.

SHEILA LEVRANT DE BRETTEVILLE: Underneath the overpass, there was some graffiti here. Some of it was hobo graffiti that was talking to people who are climbing on the trains and off the trains.

LEO LIMON: I remember kids walking by. Back then they were called hobos, you know, which were homeless actually. I’d see men walking along the tracks somewhere. They’re going somewhere.

PRINCE HALL: I guess hobos is still the same. Anywhere you go, you’d always find a campfire. And the fellas would be sittin’ around telling their life’s story. Yeah, there would be at least forty men would meet at that park every month from Nevada, from all different places. 38 UNDER SPRING

JOE LESSER: It’s very difficult for hobos today. First of all, you will see empty cars, but the rail police are far more diligent today than they ever used to be. [Previously,] hobos were kind of a strange cult that were pretty much left alone.

PRINCE HALL: If you go down the tracks on the other side of that bridge down there, there’s a train yard. The ones that is coming from this way going that way is headed to San Francisco. And the ones that go down and go around that curve is headed to Texas. In order to get to Texas, it’s gotta go through Colton, it’s gotta go through Arizona, go through Yuma. The Arizona and California line, like this right here, has a bridge over it, and there’s a river. Some people swim in it and some people fish in it. You can catch the crawdads—they have crawdads, anything.

MARK “FROSTY” MCNEILL: There’s a lot of transportation flying around. Behind you have the trains—the passenger trains and cargo trains coming zooming by. And they really, at that point, aren’t stopping or slowing down because there’s no pedestrian walkways so you get them at their full rushing speed.

PRINCE HALL: Once it turn that corner it’s gonna slow down so it’s easy to get on. Sometimes you had to run it.

MARK “FROSTY” MCNEILL: I remember thinking about the directions they were going. Like, if they were heading north, the kind of places they were going to travel and the kind of landscapes they were going to move through.

PRINCE HALL: It used to be lots of people come through, catching the train back. I used to do that, too. I used to go to Arizona every three weeks. It’s been three or four years. I think about it all the time, man, ’cause it was fun. I even had the police tell me—hey, I been caught on it a lot—but I let the police know, “Man, all I want is a ride” so they let me do it. And the police always say, “You know what, man, I sure wish I could do that.” They want to do it too!

JOE LESSER: Once in a while a railroad policeman would make some big deal about catching a hobo or something. But the hobos pretty much had free range. Hobos didn’t hurt anything unless in the winter they would start a fire in the boxcar to keep warm and it would go out of control.

PRINCE HALL: The railroad police, they called them “bulls.” HOMELESS 39

PRINCE HALL: Let’s see, I got caught one time in Colton. One of the engineers walked in there and caught me sittin’ there, but I didn’t see him coming. He said, “I like for you to get off, but you wait ’til the train stop, right?” Hey, man, automatically I already know that he’s gonna call the bull, so the train came to almost a complete stop, right? But before it stopped altogether, I had already gotten off. And all of sudden, here they come, I knew it.

PRINCE HALL: They was on one side of the train looking for me, and I was on the other side, alright. I’m dressed all in black—you can’t ride in nothing but dark because you gonna get dirty, right? So police is on one side and I’m on the other side of the train and it was so dark they couldn’t see me. I’m tipping. I walked past ’em. I see ’em over here, right? And I’m thinking, “I done got away.” And when I get down to the end of the train, there’s one standing down there waiting on me.

PRINCE HALL: You know, it had to be some fun, it is too! But you gotta watch it, man, ’cause they dangerous. They’re dangerous. You gotta know what you’re doing. Me myself, I never rode outside, I’d ride in the engine. They usually have two or three hooked together and I’d always get in that last one.

PRINCE HALL: I turn the seat around and put my feet up and open up the window, man, and choo, choo, choo, choo, choo, choo!

PRINCE HALL: Yeah, it’s fun, man. But like I said, you got to know what you doing because, hey, I’ve seen a train cut one in half, cut one foot off. You gotta watch it, man.

PRINCE HALL: When you getting on, see, you go to the middle of the train where the cuff is hooked together, right? It’ll be like that, right? Then all of a sudden it’ll open and shut and a lot of people would step on it, you know. If it opens and shuts, man, you gonna lose something. You got steel, man. I mean, big steel.

PRINCE HALL: Inside, the whole train made of steel. When it’s hot outside, it’s hot inside. When it’s cold outside, it’s cold inside. But hey, I figured out how to do it, they got a heating system on the wall for the heat control. Hey man, I had to figure out how to turn the controls on and turn the heat on and air too. 4 CONCRETE41 IS FLUID

A bridge for its time…Architectural details…Automobiles…A straitjacketed river…Water harvesting…Early history of L.A.…The railroads come…Echoes and ambient sounds…That concrete smell

A bridge can serve as a blueprint—or canvas—for a city’s values, needs, materials, ambitions, and aesthetic. From the time of its construction during the tail end of the Roaring Twenties through its relatively minor changes during the eight decades that followed, the Spring Street Bridge connected as well as reflected different parts of a city that was itself hurriedly traversing the scant one-century distance between small town and global metropolis. During the years when Under Spring was an active artwork, a controversial plan to substantially widen the 42 UNDER SPRING

bridge as part of an earthquake safety upgrade cast a looming shadow. In 2013, a lesser widening began, leading to a planned multiyear state of construction on and under the bridge. After seven years, this brought a formal conclusion to Under Spring.

JOE LINTON: The bridges are part of the City Beautiful Movement. There was an engineer named Merrill Butler who worked for the city from 1923 until 1961 and was responsible for these gorgeous, monumental, lasting bridges.

JOHN E. FISHER: Merrill Butler designed the bridges. He designed the Pasadena Freeway tunnels—the Arroyo Seco Parkway tunnels—which were then part of Figueroa Street, and he helped design the early Cahuenga Parkway through Cahuenga Pass.

ERNESTO DE LA LOZA: I’m a dreamer, I’m a dreamer. I really honestly am. I cross every bridge I can, ’cause I actually have the sensation of flying.

JOHN E. FISHER: At that time, building bridges was seen to be part of the City Beautiful Movement, where public works projects could make a city more beautiful, more decorative, give people a better feeling about the environment they’re in.

ERNESTO DE LA LOZA: I used to work at the Terminal Annex, which is the Post Office. They hired a lot of college students and I worked part time to help get through school. I always crossed the bridge to go to work.

JOHN E. FISHER: I think most of the bridges were built with bonds, and there was a big election in November 1924. That election changed the charter of the city, but it also asked for investments in infrastructure for the growing city, and people were willing—then—to pay. CONCRETE IS FLUID 43

JOHN E. FISHER: The North Spring Street Bridge—built in 1928—has some early art deco features, from when art deco was just starting to hit the United States. You can see from the integrated street lighting—the concrete lights—they have the spike lamp, which was very popular in L.A. in the mid-1920s. They’ve got the fluted design below it, and then they have kind of an art deco wedding cake–shape design as part of the base and they’re integrated with the balustrades. And that’s a key thing about the river bridges. If you just look at the pavement, you don’t see anything.

ERNESTO DE LA LOZA: We used to travel across this bridge and go all the way down Sunset, and we used to see the poster art, the blacklight art in the sixties. And then we’d bring it back to the neighborhood, this eclectic psychedelia. We saw major concerts. I saw Hendrix, I saw Cream, I saw The Doors, Janis Joplin at the Shrine, all live.

JOHN E. FISHER: I know from a few pictures I’ve seen that there was diversity among the workers, certainly whites and blacks and Chinese and Hispanic workers were on here.

JOHN E. FISHER: It was not one of the main bridges. The main bridges were Broadway and First Street and Fourth Street. Because you had the other bridges that would carry the bulk of the traffic to the east side of the city and the north of the city, this was a good—a key—connector valve, but it wasn’t one of the main thoroughfares.

FABIAN WAGMISTER: The river would flood repeatedly, all the time. It was actually a very active river, a very seasonal river. It was so active that from time to time it would change course by ten miles, twenty miles, it would move all around. They needed ways to make it [here] from more or less the Downtown area, which was where the Pueblo [was]—the Olvera Street area. So what today is the Spring Street Bridge was a very important connection between the two sides of the river—and probably, historically, the original way of connecting the east side of the river with the west side of the river. Even before there was any bridge on Third or Fourth, or Seventh, probably the very first connection was right here. 44 UNDER SPRING

JOHN E. FISHER: There are many different styles to the bridges over the L.A. River. While this one is not as elaborate as others, you can see that the ones built in 1925 and 1926 are of the Beaux-Arts design. The Fourth Street Bridge is kind of a Gothic design. The Sixth Street Bridge has art deco features, and the last bridges built over the L.A. River—which are part of the Arroyo Seco Parkway—were built in 1937 and 1942. They’re the Streamline Moderne design.

FABIAN WAGMISTER: What we now know as Spring Street had a number of different names. It was San Fernando at one point, it was Alameda at another point, and a couple of other names.

JOHN E. FISHER: [The roadway] wouldn’t have been asphalt then. You can tell because this gutter is constructed separately.

FABIAN WAGMISTER: For the longest time it actually was a little dirt street that went across, and there was a wooden bridge to go across.

JOHN E. FISHER: The Beaux-Arts design, the art deco design, the Streamline designs—they’re all built in the 1920s, ’30s, up to the early ’40s. Had they been built later—had L.A. evolved a little bit later—they would’ve been pretty much Plain Jane bridges. You can contrast those with the many bridges we have in the city that are part of the freeway system: they’re functional, they’re utilitarian, but they do not give a sense of beauty.

JAMES ROJAS: Underneath [the bridge] the architecture is really rich. It’s kind of early twentieth century infrastructure concrete. It’s really beautiful.

JOHN E. FISHER: Certainly there aren’t as many decorative features when you look at the underside. But look at the little archway. Today it would just be a horizontal surface, but because it was from the twenties, you have the angular art deco design and they put those features in with the supporting structure here. Instead of just being a triangular shape it goes down vertical, then it goes concave and then it makes a little fluted design as it comes to the base. So even on the underside, where not many people look at it, there are still features to behold. CONCRETE IS FLUID 45

FABIAN WAGMISTER: If you look at a map of the period you will see that it was mostly little houses around the North Spring Bridge and that this was the very first large brick building built after the Capitol MIlling Company. So the Capitol Mills was sort of the first industrial move towards the north of Downtown, and then this is probably the second one. And it really initiated a transformation of what was mostly a residential agricultural area into an industrial area.

JOHN E. FISHER: I think [the bridge] did undergo a slight retrofit. I think one feature that changed with the retrofit is that the balustrades would’ve been open here. But I think for seismic purposes—because this is where it connects back to the ground—they filled these in to give it more seismic strength. And once we get a little bit further up the bridge, then it’s open here, so you can see through.

JOE LINTON: The Spring Street Bridge, according to something I read, was built to relieve congestion on the North Broadway Bridge. Already in the twenties, before the Depression and stuff, we were looking at congestion, and that was streetcars and cars.

JOHN E. FISHER: Back in 1928, the city didn’t paint lane lines. That started in 1930. Back then traffic would’ve been light enough that there just would’ve been a single white line in the center to separate northbound from southbound traffic.

JAMES ROJAS: One of my projects for the past three, four years was to manage the North Spring Street Widening Project [for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority]. This project was a couple of million dollars to really renovate and widen the North Spring Street Bridge.

JOE LINTON: As a bicyclist, you have to take the [car] lane, and when you’re biking uphill to get over the river on the bridge, all of a sudden you’ve got cars right behind you, so it is an uncomfortable ride today.

JAMES ROJAS: It was a hard project and I don’t even know where it’s at right now. It really shouldn’t happen but I think it’s beyond my control. 46 UNDER SPRING

JOHN E. FISHER: As the city grew and as traffic intensified, we added in the lane lines to get four lanes out of this rather than two, and it’s kind of a tight fit. You can see that, right, because some of the concrete has been hit at the nose of the bridge here and has worn off. And you can see the skid marks.

PRINCE HALL: A lot of times the traffic would come up the street here, man, they be riding so fast they had to make a brake to keep from going out there. They be riding real fast, so they have to turn and curve it here.

JOHN E. FISHER: There wouldn’t have been all the traffic signs we have here. You wouldn’t have had the stop sign there. Back then, people had to take more responsibility for their actions. Today we try to regulate every move. We warn of curves ahead. You wouldn’t have had much of that. You wouldn’t have had a sign that says “No stopping anytime.” You would expect people to know not to park here.

JOE LINTON: They talk about what the city was like before cars really ruled the city and they had streetcars down the middle and they had a lot of detail that people would see using transit and walking. I think that we’ve sort of lost that as we’ve moved into the car age. We’ve made everything so you can see it shooting past it at seventy miles an hour. We don’t bother with that kind of detail anymore.

JAMES ROJAS: I would tend to think that concrete right there is just solid, but it’s all fluid, it’s all relative. You know men created concrete, so they can make a change in policies. CONCRETE IS FLUID 47

ED PORTER: The first time I saw this space was when I knew I was going to do this piece [a mixed-media sculpture titled Cascade] here. I was just really impressed with it as a structure and a space. It’s really visually powerful, what with these—I don’t know if you’d call these buttresses or beams or what? I didn’t know if I needed to be in competition with that, but I needed to respond to it. Otherwise I think that the visual power of the structure might have overwhelmed this piece. So I thought it would be better to try and reach out and fill the space and embrace it, rather than just exist within it. I needed to sort of become part of it.

ROXANNE STEINBERG: I have these gorgeous pictures that I took a day after a rain. It was just when Ed Porter was installing his exhibit. And the water was still in the alleys, and it was reflecting the bridge. It was just exquisite.

ED PORTER: This is the first time I’d ever used these rain gutters. I like to think of that as a link between the channel of the L.A. River out of here, sort of transporting water from one place to another. And I think it loosely references irrigation. And maybe some of the history of what was done by some of the original inhabitants of this area. So I was at least thinking of that—moving water through a channel. And that’s what’s happening in the L.A. River outside right there. And the rain gutters that are at the very top of the piece, right under the bridge, I thought of those as almost like aqueducts, moving water around or distributing it.

ADOLFO V. NODAL: You see these big 5,000-gallon tanks all around [the Metabolic Studio]? We’re collecting water from the runoff from the buildings. The first rainstorm that we had, the first five minutes of the rainstorm, we filled 15,000 gallons of water. It’s amazing how much water we can harvest if we put our minds to it.

RICHARD NIELSEN: We have the dream of harvesting water out of the L.A. River and storing it in those tanks. In the meantime, we’ve since purchased a bunch of 2,500-gallon water totes from the army surplus that we’re now going to install inside the gallery and move some of our collected rainwater into them and then store them as artworks. 48 UNDER SPRING

ADOLFO V. NODAL: The Owens Valley coming all the way down [the Los Angeles Aqueduct] to L.A. is a very, very important part of the geography for us.

JOE LESSER: Los Angeles was not the ideal location to create or build a city or a metropolis for lots of reasons. And one is that potable water is very difficult to find. We’re a semi-arid land. And most any trees that you see were planted by man. They weren’t there. They are not indigenous to the Los Angeles Basin.

RICHARD NIELSEN: We’ve taken three and a half [containers’ worth of water] to the Owens Valley and Ramon [Macias] and the guys have been watering all the plants both in the front and back [of Under Spring] with that water.

ALEJANDRO COHEN: My first feeling was like the location was very industrial, very gray. I’m originally from Buenos Aires, so it reminded me a bit of Buenos Aires. I’d never been to Manchester [England], but it would make me think of a place like that—kinda dreadful weather and gray, which I like. I guess I live in the wrong place, living in Southern California.

RICHARD NIELSEN: This was a fantastic graphic opportunity as well. Lauren [Bon] and I had been talking about different creatures and she read to me how the roadrunner, who lives out in the desert, recycles his own water out of his feces and has the ability, apparently, to stick his beak in his own ass to get water. Which we felt was perfectly appropriate for our water recycling. So I drew up a bunch of

different roadrunners and we made the H2O symbol.

FABIAN DEBORA: Sometimes we take things for granted. We’re easy to kill trees. We’re easy to cut things down and then forget about what little do we know and we tend to forget that that is what gives us life. Without these natural herbs or these trees that grow from the earth, we have nothing, really. For the Farmlab to reproduce that [via the gardens planted at Under Spring] and also introduce that to our communities who have been infested with so much concrete and damage—it’s always good to continue on that trend of believing in nature. Top: Looking toward East Los Angeles c. 1873, you can see the old Downey Avenue Bridge, a predecessor of the North Spring Street Bridge. The Southern Pacific Railroad didn’t start building until July 1873. Courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library

Middle: Detail of E. S. Glover’s “Birds Eye View of Los Angeles, California,” 1877. Downey Avenue Bridge is visible, as are several others across the Los Angeles River, including the first permanent bridge, a covered wooden structure visible in the upper right, built in 1870 across Old Aliso Road (later Macy Street and after that, Cesar Chavez Avenue). Railroads have come to the area. Courtesy of the Library of Congress Geography and Map Division, G4364.L8A3 1877 .G61

Bottom: One of the L.A. River’s periodic floods damaged the Santa Fe tracks on the old Downey Avenue Bridge in 1885. Courtesy of The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens Photo Archives

USPR_imagesig_01.indd 1 8/8/14 5:04 PM Top: Detail of H. B. Elliott’s bird’s-eye view of Los Angeles, published by Southern California Land Company, 1891. Courtesy of the Library of Congress Geography and Map Division, G4364.L8A3 1891 .E6

Bottom: Detail of B. W. Pierce’s bird’s-eye view of Los Angeles, published by Semi-Tropic Homestead Company, 1894. Courtesy of the Library of Congress Geography and Map Division, G4364.L8A3 1894 .P5

USPR_imagesig_01.indd 2 8/8/14 5:04 PM Top: Looking northwest from the east bank of the LA River at the newly built North Spring Street Bridge, 1928. Channelization of the river didn’t begin until 1938. Courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library

Bottom: This view looks from the North Broadway Bridge to the North Spring Street Bridge and shows a now-channelized river, 1958. Courtesy of the Herald-Examiner Collection, Los Angeles Public Library

USPR_imagesig_01.indd 3 8/8/14 5:04 PM Top: Drawing from “North Spring Street Bridge, Los Angeles, Los Angeles County, CA.” Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, HAER CA-275

Middle: Illustration by Chandler Wood, courtesy of the artist

USPR_imagesig_01.indd 4 8/8/14 5:04 PM Top: South side of Spring Street Bridge ramp at southwest corner, looking north, 1999. Photo by Brian Grogan. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, HAER CA-275-9

Bottom of spread: Panorama of the south side of the Spring Street Bridge looking northwest, 1999. Photos by Brian Grogan. Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, HAER CA-275-4; HAER CA- 275-5; and HAER CA-275-6

USPR_imagesig_01.indd 5 8/8/14 5:04 PM Top and middle: Aerial view of North Spring Street Bridge and photos of homeless encampments, circa 2005. Courtesy of Metabolic Studio LLC

Bottom: “Under Spring Street Bridge,” 2007. Laurie Avocado/Flickr/CC-BY-2.0

USPR_imagesig_01.indd 6 8/8/14 5:04 PM The early days of Under Spring, circa 2006. Courtesy of Metabolic Studio LLC

USPR_imagesig_01.indd 7 8/8/14 5:04 PM Contemporary illustration of the bridge and channelized river by Chandler Wood, courtesy of the artist

USPR_imagesig_01.indd 8 8/8/14 5:04 PM CONCRETE IS FLUID 49

MATIAS VIEGENER: I remember having a conversation with [California Institute of the Arts professor] Norman Klein about this—about how we both really loved, when we were driving in the country, just looking at the telephone poles and the wires connecting to them, and thinking what an enjoyable experience that was. Where we got to in that conversation was how these things that are placed in the world for more or less industrial purposes can also be appreciated entirely outside of their purpose.

MATIAS VIEGENER: With the one [telephone] pole I’m looking at—but also the other one and a half there—you don’t see the top of them [when you’re sitting under the bridge, due to the angle]. They’re truncated so you just see the [base]; you see a bit of the wires coming out underneath the bridge. You get a brown, more natural-looking object—in a way—than the concrete.

ALEJANDRO COHEN: It’s definitely changed for the better. It’s more livable or more habitable. Farmlab has done a great job in transforming the place without taking away some of its original charm.

ED P. REYES: Right around the bend is where Father Junípero Serra lands, that very first night. And he takes note of a great valley filled with trout, filled with fish, filled with wildlife and bears. And this is the birthplace and this is where the nerves from the city begin. And we’re standing right on it.

CINDI ALVITRE: The disconnect from land is one of the principles of modern technology, and that’s an absence of connectedness; we see that’s happened. Indigenous applications of technology emphasize that the knowledge of the old ones to their technology demanded that they use the power and the land sparingly and appropriately. In the old days, you fished at a certain time, you gathered at a certain time, you built things at a certain time, you did ceremony at a certain time. 50 UNDER SPRING

JOE LESSER: It became evident that the Los Angeles Harbor area and Santa Monica might be feasible places to build a railroad. Prior to that, in the 1800s and 1700s, any kind of merchandise was transported by ship from around South America and up to San Diego. It’s got a natural harbor. And further north to Los Angeles, which began to try and create a harbor, and eventually they did in San Pedro and Long Beach. And so the railroads said, “Well, obviously we’ve got to go where the ships come in.” The first railroad started out from San Pedro and Long Beach and came to Los Angeles and stopped. They didn’t go any further.

CINDI ALVITRE: We all live here together. But we can’t forget the land, the land is our ancestor—the land—and I don’t mean from a New Agey perspective either, that’s the furthest thing. This is reality. I call for a return to indigenous sensibilities, a loyalty to the land. The physical land is critical at this moment, when our very existence as [a] species is being challenged. As a native woman, as an indigenous person, my loyalty is to the land. Not the social-political construct, but the physical land.

JOE LESSER: The late 1800s and early 1900s already saw the population of people of the United States wishing to get away from the winters, and they would try and come west if they were wealthy or could afford it. They would come to the West, and where they came to was Pasadena, because Pasadena was already building fabulous hotels and was in sight of the orange groves. Los Angeles didn’t grow nearly as fast as Pasadena in the late 1800s. So the trains came as far as Pasadena and then connected with another small train that came into the Los Angeles area.

SHEILA LEVRANT DE BRETTEVILLE: From 1975 we ran a public center for women’s culture out of the [nearby] Woman’s Building. It was difficult to get people to come down here because this was not a pathway for anyone. North Spring just didn’t exist for 90 percent—oh, much more than that—probably 99.9 percent of Los Angeles. CONCRETE IS FLUID 51

JOE LESSER: Everything in Los Angeles began around the Pueblo because that was near the river and that was near the old water aqueduct that gave them potable water that they could use in the early days of the Mexican and Spanish holdings. And the Pueblo became the center of the activity, and so the railroads figured, “Well, we would like to be close to the Pueblo.” The Southern Pacific [Railroad] actually created a whole operation in what was then called Sonora Town, which would be kind of north of the Pueblo toward the Pasadena Freeway. That’s the easiest way to describe it. It became what people call it now: the Cornfield, and that area. The Southern Pacific built a roundhouse and built their infrastructure in the Cornfield yard, then adjacent yards, and began to spill out even further south into other areas.

SHEILA LEVRANT DE BRETTEVILLE: It was a constant struggle to have a public center here [at the Woman’s Building]. I really wanted very badly for what we did at the Woman’s Building to be known so there could be a discourse about it. And to bring different exhibitions that attracted different populations there at the same time so that people would meet, which is what I believe a democratic society does.

JOE LINTON: From inside the [L.A. River] channel, it’s actually kind of a neat space ’cause it’s very quiet, in some ways. Like, once you’re down kinda below grade, you still hear trains rumble by and stuff, but a lot of the traffic noise is somehow going upward, and so you get below it. The wind is coming off the water, so it’s relatively cool but it is pretty featureless. It’s all concrete, and you’ve got these bridges that are gorgeous, and there’s a lot of graffiti that you can see from down in the channel.

SHEILA LEVRANT DE BRETTEVILLE: It took more energy than we finally all had to keep that going. I was there until 1980. And little by little, any kind of entity that required a public faded and we had to rent out spaces. And so it started to move to what it’s become, basically artist spaces. And not a public center. 52 UNDER SPRING

TOM LABONGE: I used to love taking New Yorkers to show ’em the L.A. River; they didn’t even know they had an L.A. River. They would laugh when they saw it.

LEO LIMON: Cement is a good cover for cement. Keeps it healthier for a long time. I think if they would leave the aerosol art, it’d be fine. They put layers of this latex on top—latex, I’ve noticed, doesn’t have the capacity to contract and expand. They’ve put so many layers that what’s happened—contraction and expansion has led to drying out faster and cracking. That means more pollution of that product, which is a plastic, which is an oil, that goes down onto the tracks or wherever, and then eventually it’ll go into the river waterway and then down into the ocean.

TOM LABONGE: I got to meet someone from high school a couple grades before me. She was very famous in the river. She was Cha Cha, in the movie “Grease,” who started the race down the river, by Sixth Street.

LEO LIMON: I went to go in down there to see what was there. It was basically slime. It depended on the time, the season. I remember coming down here when it was raining, and things are totally different. It was wet—it was like the place was getting a cleaning. The Great Spirit was saying, “Hey, it’s time to clean the place.” And then when I would go down there to see it, you could just virtually see it was different. Because the walls were wet, and anything that smog had built upon was washing into the river and down to the ocean. During the summertime, like now, it just gets a hot, sticky kind of effect. And to see it back then, the tracks are dirty, everything’s dirty, everything’s a smog city, cement jungle kind of thing.

FABIAN DEBORA: The neighborhood that I come from was located in Pico Gardens. And back in those days, the homeboys used to go hang out at the L.A. River. Which was also underneath the Seventh Street Bridge. And what happened there was that they used to have Stacy Adams shoes. And they used to get on the edge of the riverbed. And then they used to tell their homeboys, “If you wanna be partnered down with us, or whatever the case may be, slide down the River of the Living Dead.” CONCRETE IS FLUID 53

FABIAN DEBORA: What that meant was that they pushed each other off at a cross post with their two feet flat on the edge of the riverbed. And they’ll slide down. If you’re lucky, you’ll make it all the way down. If you’re not, you’ll stumble and flip over a couple times, bump your head or whatever. That’s pretty steep if you look at it.

ANTHONY ADAMS: We used to love watching the trains go by. Sometimes we would be on the tracks and sometimes you couldn’t hear ’em but you could feel ’em.

SARAH MCCABE: I always enjoyed seeing the startled expressions of people on the trains that would go by, and waving at them, and you’d see them at the last minute. They’d be sort of spaced out and then they were kind of, “What was that?”

SHEILA LEVRANT DE BRETTEVILLE: The train came at a regular basis. It actually marked a different kind of time—it has all kinds of references to the past and to travel that is public, and where materials move from one place to another place. And it’s a very full kind of sound.

YUVAL RON: The train rails were right behind the back wall of what they said would be the stage. So five feet behind your back, as a performer—if you think, “I’m going to be on stage and five feet behind me there will be a train running?” I thought, “This is a crazy place to do a show,” you know? How can you create a music show for this kind of space? So I thought, “When you cannot fight an element you better join the element—or include the element.”

ROBYN SIMMS JOHNSON: Audiology-wise, it is an interesting space because of the echoes. It isn’t acoustically the normal space to do a show, and so you’ve got the echoes bouncing off all of that cement. And you’ve got the sounds of the night in the city in the distance. The cars on the road, the trains going by, that sort of ambient noise in the background also makes for an interesting performing experience. 54 UNDER SPRING

YUVAL RON: So from the very initial idea I thought, “I would like to do a piece that incorporates the trains and the train horns.” I was thinking about the horns. ’Cause that’s the most musical element. There’s the chug chug chug chug chugging of the rhythm, the rhythmic groove of the wheels of the train. And there’s the horns, which is more of a melodic element. You actually can figure out which note on the piano.

SHEILA LEVRANT DE BRETTEVILLE: You have lots of smells now, because you have plant materials and earth smells, but [in the mid-to-late-1970s] it didn’t even have a smell, except that concrete has a very particular smell when it rains. It has its own aroma.

YUVAL RON: In order to work with the trains, I had to research the train schedule—when do the trains pass by? It was not easy to figure out which rail, which train goes on those rails, is it the local train or the Metro train? And to contact those authorities and to get the train schedule. There’s two different trains that’s going there. There’s passenger trains and there’s freight trains.

SHEILA LEVRANT DE BRETTEVILLE: All concrete smells. There’s a way in which concrete is a very receptive material and it’s porous so the water goes in and then it gives off a kind of welcoming aroma, nothing bad.

YUVAL RON: I went in on a Saturday night, which is the same night that the show would’ve been taking place, and with my assistant we brought recording gear from my studio, we positioned it right on the trail, right next to the rails, and we recorded the trains. We got great recordings of all those horns going by and the different trains, and it was great. I took it back to my studio and I processed those train sounds, and I created loops from them and I created a whole landscape of train sounds to be part of the piece. CONCRETE IS FLUID 55

SHEILA LEVRANT DE BRETTEVILLE: Concrete is fluid. Well, it starts that way. But it also continues I guess because it accepts fluids, it’s receptive. And I love concrete. I have nothing but good things to say about concrete. 5 WU 57 WEI Public and private space…Interstitial space…Issues of access… An agreement between Farmlab and the city…Privately owned public space…Greening public space…Agbins and Junker Gardens…Land use without ownership

Under Spring wasn’t Lauren Bon and her team’s first foray into complicated issues of public space and land use. During 2005– 2006, Bon and company converted a thirty-two-acre brownfield into a welcoming park. That artwork, at once earnest, avant- garde, and irreverent, was titled Not A Cornfield. Needing office space and storage space, Bon and her team leased a warehouse near the Cornfield site. That space was dubbed 58 UNDER SPRING

Farmlab, and its back door opened out into the space that would soon become Under Spring. The area under the Spring Street Bridge is public space. It is also a microcosm of urban crisis—and opportunity. It raises all sorts of questions. What is meant by public space? What is or should be permissible there? What is the solution to the problem of homelessness? What is the best way to help an addict? What is the role of private interests attempting to reinvigorate a public space? Who controls land? What constitutes a power grab? What constitutes commendable, civic-minded community engagement?

ARI KLETZKY: In Los Angeles and maybe in the US, I think there’s a dominant story or narrative that we’re losing our public space. And when people say that, I think they mean we’re losing publicly owned public space. We’re not losing the bars. We’re losing publicly owned public space.

MATTHEW COOLIDGE: Under Spring is a cultural representative of an open- minded, non-scripted kind of activity space where things that don’t fit into normal economic conditions around the city [can occur]. It’s a kind of harbor, or a haven, for things that don’t fit in elsewhere so well. WU WEI 59

ARI KLETZKY: When people talk about the loss of public space, they are referring to something that was in existence before, or else it wouldn’t have been lost. If you look back at those spaces, the town square or the agora, you find that actually most people couldn’t go because they were exclusive. You couldn’t go if you were a minority.

MATTHEW COOLIDGE: One could imagine that Los Angeles, of all cities, might have some of the most real estate that is interstitial space. Either under bridges or as part of flyovers and cloverleaves and freeway exchanges where the ramps kind of soar up and create little triangles or circles of space that you can’t really get to. It’s in those kinds of corridors, those eddies, those incidental spaces, where things that aren’t scripted activities can take place.

ARI KLETZKY: It’s not like if you were a black person you could hang out in the town square in the Americas. So these places were very exclusive and the people who couldn’t use them weren’t able to engage in protest or critique of the absence of public space. What they did is they went elsewhere where they could go—the kitchen, the backyard, the lawn, the fields. Wherever they could go to hang out. Space was a different kind of commodity then.

JANET OWEN DRIGGS: Shouldn’t a public space also be publicly administered so therefore the people who maintain it, run it, program it, are publicly accountable no matter how creakily that process may work in the public sphere?

ARI KLETZKY: There’s publicly owned private space when you go into a public bathroom. The distinction to me is really important. [There is a] difference between going to a bar [and] going to the park [and] hanging out here. I think that the differences between those are really fascinating and really important.

JANET OWEN DRIGGS: A shopping mall or a private garden is not a public space. Under Spring falls into interesting gray-area cracks because it is a public space in that it’s publicly owned, and therefore it’s administered by the city of Los Angeles. 60 UNDER SPRING

MATTHEW COOLIDGE: Brownfields represent a different kind of space. As kind of post-industrial space, they’re just temporarily brownfields. Eventually they’ll be cleaned up and turned into other things. But I think, in a way, it will be a lot longer before we actually figure out what to do with these spaces that were never intended to be used. They do represent a kind of untapped resource.

JANET OWEN DRIGGS: I’m not sure which department would be responsible [for Under Spring]. But the thing is, they held it as public land in public trust for the people of Los Angeles. They maintained it only insofar as structural safety of the bridge was concerned.

JAMES ROJAS: The City Planning Department zones the property, [determines] the land uses. The Department of Transportation controls the traffic volume. The Bureau of Engineering controls building the bridges. The Army Corps of Engineers has jurisdiction over the river. Cultural Affairs regulates what goes on sidewalks. You have the Bureau of Sanitation for sewers. Amtrak and Metrolink—which is multi- jurisdiction—are there. The MTA owns track, Metrolink rents track. A lot of people have stakes in that one area.

ADOLFO V. NODAL: There are several civic factors that govern the bottom of the North Spring Street Bridge. This public space is an important linkage between the State Park and the river. It is also the site of an upcoming public works project to restore this historic and beautiful bridge, or rebuild and expand it.

FABIAN WAGMISTER: I think the bigger problem for me [with Under Spring] was what I felt was the lack of access anymore to the river. This has more to do with the history of our relationship with the bridge and the river than with any view on the work of Lauren [Bon] or Farmlab, okay? Completely different things.

ARI KLETZKY: At some point this was publicly owned space. WU WEI 61

FABIAN WAGMISTER: The triggering thing for me was the presence of the lock on that [gate leading to the train tracks and L.A. River, installed by Farmlab]. I was walking around like I usually walk and at that time I was very worried of anything related to Lauren because we were going through this whole Cornfield thing and I had felt that she really had very little consideration for the lives of those who live around the project because, again, the project had tremendous impact on us as far as dust and rats and trucks going in and out, day in and day out.

ADOLFO V. NODAL: The intense need for public space and parklands in this community makes any safe open space welcomed and used, so ideas for public spaces and pocket parks and plazas are at a premium. The “broken windows” effect on public space also weighs heavily on the community. Finally, community partnerships are vital to civic work, so the appearance of an angel in the form of [Farmlab] for the space in furtherance of civic goals is a godsend.

FABIAN WAGMISTER: Nobody ever came to talk to us and ask, “Hey, can we help you guys?” You know, [Not A Cornfield] was this massive art project that didn’t seem to care about those people it was impacting the most. You know, most of our artists couldn’t work here for a long time because there was too much dust and stuff. It wasn’t about the Cornfield project that we had a problem; it was with the process. It’s like, “Hey, you’re impacting us, come talk to us, okay?” But in any case, I was already kind of paranoid about the actions of Lauren Bon, just for the record.

ARI KLETZKY: This is still publicly owned space?

FABIAN WAGMISTER: Suddenly I see my access to the river and my beautiful homeless community—I know I’m being stupid and romantic about that— disappear. And so I think I said, “Here, let’s go there with our truck, let’s show our presence, let’s scream it’s ours and let’s break that lock,” or something like that. So I brought a crowbar to be able to break the lock. I don’t remember exactly how it evolved. I think we went in there and maybe we had an argument with one of the security guards. 62 UNDER SPRING

JANET OWEN DRIGGS: [Under Spring] was very much a part of a sort of dark side of the city. So it was a public space. [But] it wasn’t available to the majority of the public. When Farmlab came along and did this great cleanup job on Under Spring, the space became accessible, amenable, usable by the majority of the city.

ARI KLETZKY: Where is the property line between the city and the private?

NICK TAYLOR: There is an impact to anything you do, and gentrification has negative as well as positive effects on people. It ties to much bigger issues about homeless people, in that the reason people are sleeping under bridges—it’s not always true, but it’s generally true—it’s because of a lack of other options. There aren’t enough shelter beds in Los Angeles, or any city in the country. And there’s the lack of affordable housing, and really there’s a lack of options.

ARI KLETZKY: I wonder if the property line is the [neighboring] building, or maybe a couple feet off the building?

JANET OWEN DRIGGS: Lots and lots of programming, lots of people came and continue to come. In order to enable Farmlab to do that programming, however, we now have official authority from the city to do so. Plus we have a security guard. And the security guard as far as I know doesn’t have any kind of heavy-handed approach to people that stops them doing things here.

MATTHEW COOLIDGE: In Europe, especially, where things have been established longer, these kinds of marginal spaces have evolved more thoroughly than they have here. You’ll find that their bridges, for example, often have rooms at the footings, at the anchoring points where they connect to land. They enclose those spaces sometimes and use them as storage for municipal work, and even as offices for divisions of departments of transportation and things like that.

ADOLFO V. NODAL: At City Hall, this [was] Ed P. Reyes’s Council District 1. And in L.A. city politics, the councilmember is king over any land use and river access. The power of the City Council to control land use is legendary in our city government. WU WEI 63

MATTHEW COOLIDGE: You don’t see that much in the United States, partially because we’ve had more land at our disposal. But as that land begins to get piled up and consumed, we begin to think about those other spaces.

FABIAN WAGMISTER: I talked to Al [Nodal] a couple times about it and he was always very nice. He said, “You can do things here, it’s your space, don’t worry.” I think that the words are sincere but there’s something structural about the positioning of that project, and the use by that project of the space, that by default makes it either an Annenberg or a Farmlab space.

NICK TAYLOR: So yeah, if you come in and you take over something and you don’t give back, you don’t do anything to try to mitigate the unintended consequences of your actions, then sure, it’s [not good]. But I see the benefits from something like Farmlab and Not A Cornfield. It helps everyone.

ADOLFO V. NODAL: Councilman Reyes’s forceful leadership inspired City Hall to commit to the L.A. River, and he is the anointed leader in the Council on this issue. So anything that is done has to be supported by this thoughtful urban planner and policy wonk. Fortunately, Ed Reyes understood the need to clean up Under Spring [the area under the bridge], make it beautiful and safe and fully available to the community. With his office’s support, we started a trek to get an agreement with the city to revive Under Spring [the space].

MATTHEW COOLIDGE: The European versions of these kinds of marginal spaces between elements of transportation infrastructure—those are the most obvious precedents that I can imagine. What’s happening in the United States is that people are starting to recognize the resource that these kind of cut-away spaces represent.

ADOLFO V. NODAL: Our first supporters were the seamstresses working on the second floor of the building overlooking Under Spring. They praised us for getting rid of the drugs and fires, and cleaning it and placing the safety barrier at the train line. Next, the artists at the adjacent Woman’s Building came over and claimed it. George Yu of the Chinatown Business Improvement District immediately supported us and brought the LAPD senior lead officer over to see the transformation. And we went to our old friends at [Los Angeles Fire Department] Firehouse 23 and invited them to come and visit. We maintain close communication with both those city departments. 64 UNDER SPRING

MATTHEW COOLIDGE: Europe also has those victory gardens, or community gardens, as we call them here. Like those gardens that are in the Netherlands and Germany, where the railway and the highway slowly converging create these tiny little strips of land where people end up developing community gardens for apartment blocks that otherwise don’t have them.

FABIAN WAGMISTER: What I want to see is that the space is truly community space. So let’s talk about what needs to be there. Let’s talk about whether we put in a stage, all of us. Now who’s the community is difficult to say. Right? Anybody who cares should be the community in this case, or at least that lives nearby or works nearby.

JANET OWEN DRIGGS: People wander in and out and see what’s going on and sit down and enjoy the view. But the security is there to stop any antisocial behavior. And it is Farmlab and the security guard who determine what antisocial behavior is. So that means it’s not public space because we are not publicly accountable. So there you see the anomaly.

FABIAN WAGMISTER: We had sort of really become a part of this part of the city, and being able to go under the bridge and on to the river was very important. Unfortunately, one of the by-products of the creation of Farmlab and the establishment in that particular building had to do with a couple things that I understand why they were done, but I regret that they were done. First was, I’m not sure what to call it because I don’t know the details, but the disappearance of the homeless community.

ARTEMIO TORRES: I’ve spoken with homeboys and I told them that we [the security guards at Under Spring] were coming in new, you know, and these were gonna be the new rules.

ADOLFO V. NODAL: Our public use policy is to keep this place public land. Other than displacing the drugs and prostitution and general lawlessness, cleaning it and adding a wonderland of plants, we also provide full-time security and light, and make it available for organized events and casual use. We also provide a myriad of public programs at no cost. This policy is posted at the entrances to the space. Everyone is welcome. WU WEI 65

FABIAN WAGMISTER: I understand that it’s better for homeless people not to be homeless. But I felt that was a very protected and decent possibility. I’m sure they were doing drugs, some of them. I’m sure some of them have big health problems. But, you know, it was a little confusing to me how the thing happened. For a big cultural organization to emerge and suddenly this homeless community disappeared, something about it felt like—I’m not sure how to describe it.

ADOLFO V. NODAL: In mid-2006, after we moved into the warehouse, and were the only ones fronting Under Spring, we proposed the idea to Councilman Reyes’s office. We proposed an “alley vacation”—that’s an official city term—since the space had no commercial use needs other than our spaces.

FABIAN WAGMISTER: It’s easy for me sometimes to emotionally respond to things in the moment. But I like to be a reasonable person who looks at situations for what they really are, and sometimes you don’t really know the sequence of events. It felt like an emptiness emerged. And there was, to me, a negative connotation to that emptiness. And the negative connection had to deal with lack of dialogue.

ADOLFO V. NODAL: We also suggested the possibility of getting a Special Event Permit for six months at a time. The Council office surveyed the community, and, although there were at least two esteemed neighbors that wanted to keep the space as is, everyone supported the idea of making this place safe and usable to the community.

ARI KLETZKY: The existence of public property where the city allows nonelected officials who are not employees of the state to use that space…I’m trying to digest what this is.

FABIAN WAGMISTER: The bridge was everybody’s bridge, including me, and including the homeless. And some group, for whatever good or bad purposes, decided to change something in our community without any consultation with the community. And there may be legal precedent to do it that way, but from our point of view it felt like this: “Huh? What happened? And how did it happen without our participation?” 66 UNDER SPRING

ARI KLETZKY: But the stuff that you install here, that’s where the line gets crossed, I guess. Because if this was a park next to your office building and you guys did a picnic, that’s temporary. But as soon as you guys start doing something that physically changes the space—do you have to get a permit or do you just go out and put it up?

OLIVIA CHUMACERO: We have to comply with all the fire department requirements. We used to get the permits off Alhambra Avenue and Vignes Street, downtown, but they closed that station down. Now I have to go to the station in Lincoln Heights—it’s just across the bridge from us. I go to the firehouse and ask for a fire permit for an event, and then we have to comply with the regulations for fire extinguishers, and hose, and water.

FABIAN WAGMISTER: And also what happened in relationship to the community is that immediately [the homeless people] are removed, or whatever it is, and immediately these red cones appear the same day and security guards appear, as in this is somebody’s territory. And all of that to us was very, very shocking because, again, we were so used to going and feeling it was all of ours.

ARTEMIO TORRES: When people come visit, they ask if they can come in. And we tell them they can look at the plants, don’t destroy them, take photographs. The guards are, you know, watching them, if nothing’s happening. Some people might get offended that we’re following them, but we explain to them that it’s not anything towards them—we’re trying to protect them.

ADOLFO V. NODAL: In May 2007, we formally applied to the Department of Public Works for a Revocable Permit at a cost of $2,600, paid to the city treasury. We also revamped our liability insurance to comply with the application process based on their letter of compliance in response to the application.

FABIAN WAGMISTER: That was our last point of access to the river. Now, the truth is that it was illegal for us to cross the railroad [tracks]; we all know that you’re not supposed to cross railroads, and it was illegal for us to go into the river. WU WEI 67

ADOLFO V. NODAL: On June 26, 2008, we met with Public Works officials and staff regarding this change, and we were told that we already had what they call an “R-Permit” on file for all the plants on the space.

FABIAN WAGMISTER: It was our privilege to do it. It wasn’t our right. I understand we didn’t have a right to do that, but it was a privilege we had that we really enjoyed. And so that really felt very aggressive, the establishing of the space.

ADOLFO V. NODAL: Public Works also informed us that they performed a site visit earlier that week to see the space and our use. We discussed the difficulty in figuring out what type of public use this really was, and a variety of possible permit scenarios.

ARI KLETZKY: I think there’s a difference with having public space that is privately owned public space. And that distinction is really big.

FABIAN WAGMISTER: A lot of my students come and go to events there, and I really appreciate what [the Metabolic Studio members] do. And I really even like all of the other activities, you know, how you use the park now and stuff like that. I think it enriches the community. It still hurts, though.

ADOLFO V. NODAL: Soon after our meeting with Public Works, it was decided that we would get a permit of some kind and the city refunded us $1,605 because of the permit change and reduction in cost. In subsequent correspondence with Public Works, we were informed that an R-Permit had not been actually given, and we were asked to be patient while they worked on it.

ARI KLETZKY: Of all the people who walk through here, how many of them think that this is publicly owned space and how many think that it is privately owned space? 68 UNDER SPRING

FABIAN WAGMISTER: As much as those involved with Farmlab and Under Spring can say to me, “You’re welcome to do things here,” it still feels very much like their space. And I’m not sure how that could be different anymore. It may or may not. It doesn’t hurt in a way that I want [them] gone.

ADOLFO V. NODAL: Throughout this process, Councilman Reyes’s office [was] engaged and helpful. On July 10, 2008, the councilmember’s senior staff and Farmlab agreed on a use protocol for the space.

FABIAN WAGMISTER: I hope at some point we can find a solution, not just because of me, but because it’s the right thing. Given that legally it’s all of our space somehow.

MATIAS VIEGENER: The city of L.A., I think it’s the Parks Department, has a whole set of rules about what you’re allowed to plant in public space and what you’re not allowed to plant. And one of the things in that set of rules is that no fruit-bearing tree can be planted in public space because it creates a problem in terms of litter and vermin.

SALVADOR BAUTISTA: [At seven in the morning] all these ladies who work upstairs in the building come here. If we have tomatoes growing or some other kind of produce they can eat, or take home to cook, then they come and take it.

MATIAS VIEGENER: It’s also what they call an attractive nuisance for kids, right? They’ll come and climb it. In Fallen Fruit, we discovered an interesting counterpart to that regulation, which is that the city also has a kind of mandate to stay green, so if such a tree already exists in public space, they actually can’t remove it. So they will take care of it, but they won’t plant it. And if you plant it, you’ll get in trouble. But if it gets planted, it has to be taken care of.

JANET OWEN DRIGGS: What we found is that by having the garden units mobile, those fears are allayed and it is possible to facilitate the growth of fruits and vegetables and flowers by individual members of the public on public space, because we did it with the Farmlab Agbin Garden on the Los Angeles State Historic Park, welcomed by the State Parks department. WU WEI 69

MATIAS VIEGENER: The agbins. When I first saw them, I kinda thought they were sad and shabby, and I thought, “Ugh,” you know, more clutter. They have really grown on me over time, and now I love them. I love the mix of purpose and care and neglect—the way that kind of creates a narrative of survival.

MATIAS VIEGENER: Like the upside-down trees [at Under Spring]: I’ve seen tomatoes planted that way before. Hydroponic tomatoes. And to see it in a more art context—as something to be looked at and thought about—is lovely, is just very amusing. It’s a kind of visual joke. But it also made this echo about the very urban and concrete paved nature of the space where we actually can’t plant anything here, right? And there’s lots of things growing in containers on the concrete, but the problem of the space is how industrial and unrelated it is compared to what we think of as the earth—although, of course, it is part of the earth.

MATIAS VIEGENER: The [plants] we’re looking at right now wouldn’t exist without humans. Most of those plants are cultivated, which means they were selected out by humans, often over centuries.

JANET OWEN DRIGGS: The South Central Farm was being closed down as the Not A Cornfield project came to an end and Lauren Bon, the artist responsible for Not A Cornfield, worked hard behind the scenes to help rescue the South Central Farm. It didn’t happen. The Farm wasn’t rescued. It was bulldozed. The farmers were forcibly evicted. [Ed. Note: The fourteen-acre community garden was thought to be on public land, acquired by the city of Los Angeles by eminent domain. The project that justified the eminent domain never came to fruition, however, and years after the space had been repurposed as a community garden, one of the previous property owners sued. The city settled and the gardens were destroyed.]

JANET OWEN DRIGGS: Some of the farmers were able to get back into the Farm and collect seeds and rescue plants. Farmlab helped them do that. Lauren and the Annenberg Foundation also purchased, I think it was 110 trees from Ralph Horowitz, who was the putative, is the putative owner of the South Central Farm site. 70 UNDER SPRING

JANET OWEN DRIGGS: Everyone of course was very involved and sympathetic with the Farm. The seeds of the South Central Farm have been and continue to be distributed throughout Los Angeles.

ROBYN SIMMS JOHNSON: It’s turning into a Garden of Eden again. It’s a green space where you would not imagine a green space could possibly ever be.

ROBYN SIMMS JOHNSON: I really dig all of those cars with the plants in them, those junker cars with the plants. I’m very aware that the under the bridge space is a total reuse, recycle of what’s at hand.

RICHARD NIELSEN: We got the [1978 GMC Caballero], and it was already partially torn apart. I brought all my personal tools down for cutting metal and stripping engine equipment and things like that.

PEDRO CARRANZA: On the Mercedes, I removed the motor and transmission fluid and did other work.

RICHARD NIELSEN: Olivia [Chumacero] gave us that Volvo and we dragged that underneath the bridge. That was fun stripping because that involved some heavier machines and pulling engines out and things like that.

PEDRO CARRANZA: The Honda? It came from the guy on the corner—I don’t know what is his business. Before it came here, the car was being used as a pool. This guy gave it to Farmlab. It needed fixing. We put in the plants. Put in the liner. Put in everything.

TOKER: I like this—I would say “abandoned” car—but it’s not, since it’s grown. It’s got a sunroof that people pay thousands of dollars for. And the banana tree in the back, it’s pretty awesome. I like the farmland development back here; it’s really amazing. I like that tower outside and the chicken hangout over here. It’s an open shelter. WU WEI 71

FABIAN DEBORA: That was very creative, how to use those materials. How to use a car as a pot. It’s good. It’s a way of blending it in with the environment rather than just making it look like a stolen vehicle or something. But I like it, just the fact that they can grow out of anything there.

ROSA: We’ll come for lunch because I work on Skid Row. So we need to get away from there sometimes. Maybe even bring one of my clients to just come on a nature walk when they’re feeling depressed.

JANET OWEN DRIGGS: What do I see? I see a workshop where people are endeavoring to explore the possibility of greening a city in a way that will be permissible to landowners and local authorities who frankly are terrified that if they give over their land, their soil, even if it’s publicly owned soil like the State Park, they’re terrified that the people who plant in that soil will develop such a sense of ownership over the soil that they won’t move.

JANET OWEN DRIGGS: So what I see is the workshop for that inquiry. The inquiry into land use without land ownership. 6 ANOTHER73 CITY IS POSSIBLE A harp rigged to a bridge…A night of ambient music…La Ofrenda…Weddings and birthdays…Mushrooms and plants… Another Los Angeles is possible…A space transformed…Lauren Bon’s vision

Regularly transformed between 2006 and 2013 by artist Lauren Bon and her team, Under Spring served as—among many other things—a workshop, a public square, a ceremonial ground, a rehearsal space, a dog park, a conversation in neon, a spot for political stagecraft, a musical instrument, the setting for a hoedown, and the new generation of an infamously bulldozed 74 UNDER SPRING

local urban farm. With each new iteration, not only did the function of the space change, but—as much as the bridge’s arches allowed—its form changed as well. Under Spring is an inspiring blueprint for other interests and entities looking to reclaim analogous marginalized urban spaces.

YUVAL RON: [Bill] Close invented [the earth harp]. It’s a very large instrument. It’s basically a harp with metal strings that go three hundred to one hundred feet high.

BILL CLOSE: I installed the earth harp underneath the bridge. You can rig it outdoors. You can rig it to trees. You can rig it to canyon walls. You can rig it to balconies inside performance art centers.

YUVAL RON: The strings are connected to a wooden box that is the sound chamber, and the strings extend from the wooden chamber—that is typically on the stage—to out above the audience’s heads over to the far end of the concert hall or the performance space.

BILL CLOSE: I had experienced working in ruins at the Coliseum, where we strung a giant arch. There’s just something fantastic about bringing these huge strings into an ancient-world-like quality.

YUVAL RON: I thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could rig this instrument to the bridge?” And then the bridge become part of the instrument, because it’s what the strings are connected to, and the vibration of the strings will vibrate the bridge and the vibration will be felt by the audience that sits under the strings.

YUVAL RON: I was triggering the train sounds from my computer, and I was conducting on the earth harp with my right hand and conducting with my left the woodwind player. ANOTHER CITY IS POSSIBLE 75

BILL CLOSE: The middle C on the earth harp is a 42-foot-long string. And then the octave on that is 84 feet and then the octave above that is 168 feet. The quality of the sound from the earth harp really reminded me of the trains—where the [strings are] bowed more it comes out with that sound.

YUVAL RON: It was a full moon, and it was beautiful audience—the audience was a really, really wonderful, wonderful group of bohemians and artists and musicians and art lovers; a great group of people came. And there were dogs and children—it was magical.

BILL CLOSE: The funnest moment I had was playing it with The Edge [from the band U2] down there at the show. We were jamming on the earth harp together.

ADOLFO V. NODAL: Why do we call it an Optimists’ Breakfast? Because only an optimist gets up this early on Friday the thirteenth.

TOM LABONGE: I just wanna welcome you to Farmlab and welcome Lauren, it’s always good to see you. Ice cream comes when it’s over seventy-five degrees. So I know you’re not gonna get any today.

ANTHONY GUTIERREZ: I think Under Spring is a fabulous endeavor. I sometimes wish the events and lectures were more accessible and not quite as extremely scientifically oriented but more sometimes community oriented.

BRANDY FLOWER: [Hit + Run is] a mobile silkscreen unit so we brought down equipment and set up outside because it’s a beautiful day in Los Angeles and there’s not a cloud in the sky. We got set up underneath the bridge, which gave us ample shade, cool breeze, nice tranquil environment with lots of nice plants and just a very calm vibe for everybody to learn a little bit and not necessarily seem like too much of a school lecture type of thing. We kinda let our actions speak louder and we printed about a hundred shirts for people today, different designs from local L.A. artists.

DEBORAH SZEKELY: I’m not just an optimist, I’m a realist, I brought my windbreaker. 76 UNDER SPRING

RICHARD MONTOYA: I know you’re freezing; we’re cold, we wanna get on with that most American and patriotic act called the raffle. And so as a clown it is my duty this morning. And the young lady will bring up the raffle basket. Oh, no, that’s fruit. Okay. Thank you, honey. Was she in your way? Oh, man, Uncle Sam!

BRANDY FLOWER: I think we had probably babies to senior citizens and everywhere in between—guys, girls, people on bikes, kids in strollers; and everybody was really receptive to what we did and what we’re doing.

RICHARD MONTOYA: Come on, Unabomber, let’s go. What’s your name? All right, Sam, how appropriate is that—Uncle Sam. Sam, do they have Soyrizo in Topanga Canyon? A Trader Joe’s? Okay. You can find Soyrizo at the Trader Joe’s. Yeah, but you gotta cook it a long time or it’s really slimy. OK, I’m just sharing that with you, Sam. Did you enjoy yourself this morning?

BRANDY FLOWER: I think we even had a couple repeat offenders in the house—a couple people that have been to other [silkscreenings]. But it’s just such a nice space out here. There’s so much potential, it seems. We’re usually at events where they’re either a packed party or club and it’s a little chaotic, so it was nice to come out here and have more than enough space, more than enough breathing room to just make it a great afternoon.

RICHARD MONTOYA: Okay, Sam, if you’ll reach into Auntie Sam’s hat there and pull out the winning raffle ticket. Don’t you love it here, Sam? Don’t you love it here? It’s like Burning Man meets City Hall, isn’t it? How ’bout a little high five right there? Yeah.

BRANDY FLOWER: The open-air atmosphere is just so natural. There’s not as much tension in the air as there would in maybe a normal club that maybe reeks of alcohol and a bunch of perfume and smoke and a bunch of weird frames of mind. I think this is a much more sober, fresh environment. There’s a place for each and I think this is a great place. ANOTHER CITY IS POSSIBLE 77

RICHARD NIELSEN: Lauren set the ladder chairs for people to sit on and contemplate the reflection of the words “Concrete Is Fluid” while listening [with headphones] to the sounds of a thunderstorm, and that moving water underneath the bridge.

ANTHONY ADAMS: [A security guard] escorted us all around, and he was being very, very polite, and then he showed us these headphones. He showed us the headphones and we put ’em on and we were trippin’. It was neat because it was nighttime and it really sounded like it was raining. I loved it.

RICHARD NIELSEN: There was an interesting duality going on because those ponds were—in a sense—not moving, they were almost stagnant, and we had them lined up with the ladder chairs and then [on your headphones] you would have this sort of tumultuous rain shower kinda going on. You would sit there, and it was pretty transportive.

MARK “FROSTY” MCNEILL: Tonalism is a night based on ambient music, inspired a lot by the happenings that people like Terry Riley had here in Los Angeles and in San Francisco, where they would do overnight events where he would play saxophone songs for up to twelve hours and run it through tape loops and stuff like that. People would be encouraged to come and sleep there, to the music. Also people like John Cage and Yoko Ono would have these happenings in New York.

IRENE TSATSOS: Tonalism was an overnight concert, a series of musical events.

MARK “FROSTY” MCNEILL: I was mostly working that night—running from here to there—and at some point I looked and there were like two hundred something people laying down on the floor listening to ambient music, and I’ll never forget that—it was such a great feeling.

IRENE TSATSOS: There wasn’t a catalyzing event. It was sort of the opposite of that. It was this range of activity that [encouraged] public space to be activated in such a peaceful way.

MARK “FROSTY” MCNEILL: We had suggested to bring your sleeping bags or your blankets. People really had their full little camping zones set up. 78 UNDER SPRING

IRENE TSATSOS: It was a tone, an idea that was put forth that this could be a space for a public outing without an agenda or a purpose. It was sort of, not purposeless—nothing happened at all. It was kind of great.

MARK “FROSTY” MCNEILL: A big part of the concert was molded or influenced by the site itself, under the bridge.

IRENE TSATSOS: At about 4:30 in the morning, I was on my way to the kitchen— we started to put out some bagels. I was doing that and it turned into an opportunity to have lots of interesting conversations with people who just wanted some bagels. It was the most unscripted kind of natural engagement.

ALEJANDRO COHEN: The first time I visited the under-the-bridge site, I went to Farmlab to talk to them about doing Tonalism there. Within fifteen minutes it was pretty much decided that we were gonna do it, which is absolutely insane when you think about it. It’s like there’s a million shots coming, all of them are projects, and most of them don’t go through. And there’s just that one—that odd shot that just crushes through all the barriers and manages to get through and hit the target.

MARK “FROSTY” MCNEILL: I played live with my group Languis and we did a surround-sound six-speaker show, and it was a big drone for like twenty minutes. We definitely had melodies and we practiced for it, but it also was highly improvised within certain scales.

ALEJANDRO COHEN: When I saw the place, it totally blew my mind. But I have such lack of vision that my mind was like, “It has to be at a park!” And under the bridge is not a park, it’s concrete.

MARK “FROSTY” MCNEILL: I remember at some point me and my bandmate both locked into this loop, you know, these arpeggios of guitars, and we kept it going for a while and it was such an amazing feeling.

ALEJANDRO COHEN: Then I kinda hit myself, saying, “Come on. Look at it. This is a great opportunity.” And that’s when I really opened my eyes and saw the possibilities and how amazing that site is, and how it was gonna be better than anything else I could’ve thought of. ANOTHER CITY IS POSSIBLE 79

MARK “FROSTY” MCNEILL: The space was covered in visuals; it would change as you walked from under the bridge and looked at it. Visuals were being projected on rafters. And you would walk underneath and they would sort of disappear, kind of like pictures forming, as you turn corners and looked at it from different angles.

ALEJANDRO COHEN: The last time I went was for the [seminal German electronica duo] Cluster show. The time before, I went there to see the place and I took my baby Benjamin there, and I put on the headphones with the rain sounds.

MARK “FROSTY” MCNEILL: Just being able to kind of flood that area with a lot of stimulation through sound and through visual aspects was neat, but then really it was about the people coming into the space and just kind of settling in the space and finding their little kind of zone within this kind of a wide-open area.

ALEJANDRO COHEN: The Cluster guys, when they came on stage, they absolutely loved it. People asked for one more song, an extra song, which—in this context—you never hear that. And these guys are probably just amazed that there’s these crazy people under the bridge going to see them thirty or almost forty years after they started making music.

SALVADOR BAUTISTA: There have been a lot of events, and I think the one that I remember most is when we had the [Old Time Social] square dance.

ALEJANDRO COHEN: They did an interview afterwards, and yeah, they were ecstatic about it.

SALVADOR BAUTISTA: I brought all my family and they enjoyed it like always. Everyone did. Lauren was here, Richard [Nielsen], and they danced probably two hours without stopping.

YASKIN CHUMACERO: The most distinct memory I have is when we did La Ofrenda, which is the Day of the Dead ceremony and event.

OLIVIA CHUMACERO: La Ofrenda comes from what is commonly documented and accepted all through Mayan and Aztec traditions. We create altars and create art that is representative of the ancestors that we’re trying to honor and remember. 80 UNDER SPRING

SARAH MCCABE: [At La Ofrenda, 2006] there were a thousand lit candles and all of those flowers from the field, and all of these people that were there with their altars that were just beaming and were so excited. I mean, we could’ve had more people but the spaces were so magical and so beautiful.

YASKIN CHUMACERO: I helped put up the candles and bring out the bicycles that roamed around, with the structure in the back for the kids. And soon after that, I hit the stage—I was standing there with my group, performing.

SARAH MCCABE: Lauren came and constructed a giant spiral with several thousand of the marigolds, and there was a fire in the center of it. So people were coming and walking through the spiral. You just go and sit and be still. I saw several people crying that were just walking around just in awe of how beautiful it was.

OLIVIA CHUMACERO: We had dragon dancers from Chinatown. We had Japanese puppets. And from the Bolivian culture we had a dance group and they did all the traditional social dances. We had poets and spoken word and hip-hop artists and performing artists.

YASKIN CHUMACERO: The name of the group at the time was Table of Contents and it consisted of three of my brothers. That was at the La Ofrenda event and ceremony, which was amazing. The group itself was conscious hip-hop.

KAREN NOGUES: My brother had died a year previous, and I had been feeling like I really needed to do something for him. I came down [to La Ofrenda] and it was just, I felt so connected to him. And so many people felt the same way that this…it created this…I’m…I’m losing my words because it was just so powerful. It made it so easy for people to pay homage to their family and their loss.

SARAH MCCABE: The altar that I built against the wall at Under Spring was dedicated to four girls that had been murdered in Seattle. Clockwise from top: Farming a Volvo at Junker Car workshop, ©2007 Metabolic Studio LLC

Artist Lauren Bon, ©2007 Metabolic Studio LLC

One of four five-thousand- gallon water tanks installed to collect rainwater runoff from adjacent warehouses (roadrunner graphic by Richard Nielsen based on research by Lauren Bon), ©2009 Metabolic Studio LLC

Algae fountain and Tree Monuments (artworks made with two trees rescued from South Central Farm and planted upside down), ©2008 Metabolic Studio LLC

USPR_imagesig_02.indd 1 8/8/14 5:05 PM Clockwise from top: Seed Saving workshop, ©2007 Metabolic Studio LLC

Farmlab coordinator Jaime Lopez Wolters with Rosebuds (artworks made with chain link fences and found objects from South Central Farm), ©2007 Metabolic Studio LLC

Farmlab artist-in-residence Gerardo Vaquero Rosas from South Central Farm at Earth and Seeds exhibition, ©2007 Metabolic Studio LLC

USPR_imagesig_02.indd 2 8/8/14 5:05 PM All photos but bottom left: Old Time Social event with Susan Michaels, White Lightning, Hollywood Bowl Weevils, and Hi-Hos, ©2007 Metabolic Studio LLC

Bottom left: Thank-You BBQ for salon participants with music by Triple Chickenfoot, ©2007 Metabolic Studio LLC

USPR_imagesig_02.indd 3 8/8/14 5:05 PM Top and bottom right: La Ofrenda, ©2007 Metabolic Studio LLC

Bottom left: L.A. Derby Dolls preparing to join a parade transporting “ag bin” planters to Skid Row, ©2007 Metabolic Studio LLC

USPR_imagesig_02.indd 4 8/8/14 5:05 PM Top: Tonalism event curated by Dublab, part of Accidentally on Purpose, a series of four free-of-charge evenings celebrating summertime and spontaneity, featuring live music, movement, dance, and puppetry, ©2007 Metabolic Studio LLC

Bottom left: Cluster with Lucky Dragons, ©2008 Metabolic Studio LLC

Bottom right: Installation of ladder chairs with headphones playing water and thunder sounds during Water Under the Bridge performance (artwork which connected the Owens Dry Lake Bed to Under Spring), ©2008 Metabolic Studio LLC

USPR_imagesig_02.indd 5 8/8/14 5:05 PM All photos: Paul Stamets’s How Mushrooms Can Save the World workshop, ©2007 Metabolic Studio LLC

USPR_imagesig_02.indd 6 8/8/14 5:05 PM Clockwise from top right: Yuval Ron and William Close perform on the Earth Harp, part of Accidentally on Purpose series, ©2007 Metabolic Studio LLC

Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale that the Society Has the Capacity to Destroy, ©2006 Metabolic Studio LLC

Concrete Is Fluid, ©2008 Metabolic Studio LLC

Wu Wei [translation from Chinese: Do Nothing, citation by Dean Q In Gwun Ma], ©2010 Metabolic Studio LLC

USPR_imagesig_02.indd 7 8/8/14 5:05 PM Top: Karen and Nick Taylor’s wedding, 2008, courtesy Karen and Nick Taylor

Bottom left: Jenna Didier and Oliver Hess’s wedding reception, ©2008 Scott Mayoral

Bottom right: Theo’s first birthday party, 2008, courtesy Janet Owen Driggs

USPR_imagesig_02.indd 8 8/8/14 5:06 PM ANOTHER CITY IS POSSIBLE 81

KAREN NOGUES: My brother—they called him the Blackbird. He was always kinda this oddball maverick, kind of a lost soul, and he found himself through service. He volunteered for the AmeriCorps after [Hurricane] Katrina, and I found a wooden bird that I printed his name on. I still have that blackbird on my home altar.

SARAH MCCABE: I built it out of all of these old birdhouses, which were being thrown away.

KAREN NOGUES: You didn’t talk very much. You just kind of exchanged weepy glances and hugs. It was just a really emotional overhaul, ’cause there’s just so much guilt for me not really doing much in his honor. I’ve devoted myself to service after going to his funeral.

SARAH MCCABE: Autumn [Rooney] and Kindred [Gottlieb] went to high school with another girl. I guess her name was Erin. The three of them went to high school together in Pasadena and the three of them were very, very close. And after high school they all sort of lost touch with each other.

KINDRED GOTTLIEB: My sculptures for quite a few years all center around grief that’s related to losing a child of mine before birth.

KINDRED GOTTLIEB: Part of my process of grieving over all that was to start sculpting again and I started sculpting all these stories, all these sculptures essentially of grief and loss. About two years after that, I was living in Berlin and I guess it was in 2002 or 2001. I was planning on returning to Los Angeles and I caught news that a good friend of mine from high school and also college had lost her five-year-old daughter to an abduction. I was so moved and devastated by that that I actually canceled my trip back to the United States.

SARAH MCCABE: Kindred and Autumn stayed in touch, but they lost touch with this other girl, and they didn’t hear about her until their friend Erin’s daughter was—I guess it was one of the biggest news stories of the time and it’s a very sad story—but apparently her five-year-old daughter was abducted and murdered. 82 UNDER SPRING

KINDRED GOTTLIEB: I stayed in my room and just worked in the studio. I ended up coming out with a little tiny, tiny sculpture of a grieving mother; essentially very simplified and very abstract and I called it the child and his mother, and it was a piece essentially inspired by the grief [over Erin’s] daughter’s abduction.

SARAH MCCABE: Not knowing [the story about Erin’s daughter], I had asked Kindred to come and make an altar for the Day of the Dead, and she did, and at the center of her altar, she put that little statue that she had made for Erin and for her daughter several years back.

KINDRED GOTTLIEB: I have the piece. It was only about two, three inches tall. I did it all white and I put it on my website not for sale and put under the title Homage to Samantha and called it “child and mother” and always wanted to send it to Erin. It was always in the back of my mind. But I never contacted her.

KINDRED GOTTLIEB: By a sort of random amazing series of coincidences, my friend Erin happened to be tagging along with another friend who happened to be tagging along with yet another friend who happened to hear through the grapevine that we were doing this event. So at the end of their night of doing stuff they said, “Hey, let’s go check out what’s happening at Under Spring.”

SARAH MCCABE: Kindred and Autumn were both dancing that night, about 11:30 at night, and lo and behold, Erin—who they hadn’t seen since high school— happened to show up that night. She’d never been to Farmlab and she’d never been to Under Spring, but a friend of hers just said, “I’m going dancing and I want you to come.”

KINDRED GOTTLIEB: Erin showed up and I hadn’t seen her since college and so at some point it was just the two of us in there. I said, “I have to tell you something.” I said, “This tiny piece is in honor to your daughter.” She started weeping.

OLIVIA CHUMACERO: Paul Stamets spoke on a Friday night. Saturday morning, at eight o’clock, we started preparing for his workshop. Paul took us through two different methods of growing mushrooms, using logs and using bags. ANOTHER CITY IS POSSIBLE 83

MATIAS VIEGENER: Paul Stamets has an outline of complex interrelated ideas about what the fungus—what the mushrooms—can do for us. What they’ve already done and what they can and will do in the future. Which was so powerful and transformative and utopian in every fabulous sense of that word, and filled me with potential and hope and dreaming.

OLIVIA CHUMACERO: We bored quarter-inch holes into short pieces of wooden logs. Then we plugged the holes with small round pellets containing mushroom spores. Then we covered the log with hot wax to ensure that no bacteria would come into the holes. This process takes about a year for mushrooms to sprout. The log must be kept in a cool dark space and occasionally misted with water.

KAREN TAYLOR: Nick and I were here one night to see Paul Stamets speak, to learn about the magic of mushrooms. We were sitting under here and Nick looked up and said, “I think we should get married here.”

OLIVIA CHUMACERO: The mushroom spores that were grown in plastic bags were a completely different process. First, dry straw was placed in hot water using special stainless-steel containers for sterilization. Then, the straw was injected with mushroom spores, and this mix was stuffed into plastic bags. The bags were then perforated with tiny holes all over to allow the mushrooms a space to grow out. In time, mushrooms came out and they were beautiful.

NICK TAYLOR: We’d been struggling with where we wanted to get married and it just seemed like a really easy and good place to do it. The symbology of the bridge really resonated.

JENNA DIDIER: The exuberance and freshly revived beauty of the Cornfield park struck Oliver [Hess] and I as the perfect place to get married. We were seduced by Farmlab and the Metabolic Studio’s transformation of the southern end of the Cornfield into a portable community garden, and the area of Under Spring into a lush garden full of fountains, berries, vegetables, and fruiting vines. 84 UNDER SPRING

JANET OWEN DRIGGS: Under Spring was the site we chose to have our son’s first birthday party. Theo was conceived while I was working for the Metabolic Studio. So all of my colleagues saw me growing with him, and welcomed him into the world with me. And it just seemed like a perfect place to celebrate his first year of life. A place that’s full of plants, beautiful flowers, tinkling waterfalls, lizards. And it’s safe, there’s no traffic. And sheltered from the sun.

AUTUMN ROONEY: I wanted to mention Flo [i.e., Karen Taylor] and Nick’s wedding. My oldest friends got married under the bridge. One of our other oldest friends [Erica Rawlings] got ordained and conducted the wedding. And she gave a really beautiful speech about how a bridge bridges two bodies of land together, and they’re bridging two people together, and made it into a metaphor. That was just a beautiful thing.

JENNA DIDIER: The various enterprises of the team at Under Spring are closely in line with our own [Didier and Hess’s partnership, Materials & Applications] but at a much larger scale. We have always found a kinship with [The Metabolic Studio’s] projects and we were excited to introduce our friends and family who were not already familiar with them to the amazing work emanating out of this group.

FABIAN WAGMISTER: The birth of the baby, of our daughter, Sue, has been a very important change for us in terms of our relationship to the community.

JANET OWEN DRIGGS: We invited probably fifty-odd people, children in a variety of age ranges. There were blankets all over the floor with babies crawling on them. We had kids with tricycles and balloons. And seven-year-olds, nine-year-olds, eleven-year-olds.

KAREN TAYLOR: We had eighty guests. It was a very warm June day. We had the ceremony at six in the evening and we had it set up so that people could drink and socialize and just be very comfortable. And our ceremony was short and sweet. Our dear friend Erica, who was the officiant, was dressed in a Scottish kilt—the full banana with the shiv and the whole thing. ANOTHER CITY IS POSSIBLE 85

JENNA DIDIER: The afternoon was without parallel, it was fun and exciting and memorable. Our only hope is that more and more people recognize what is possible in their communities to develop new ways of operating creatively, healthily and sharing with one another.

FABIAN WAGMISTER: We’ve had some very good people. Some of the artists in the Woman’s Building like to walk and they stop by, talk to our daughter.

MATIAS VIEGENER: Last summer, Fallen Fruit—which [is] me, David Burns, and Austin Young—organized an event to mark the end of a project which was called Love Apples, in which we planted tomatoes in public space with Islands of LA—with Ari Kletzky.

JANET OWEN DRIGGS: We had a little treasure hunt. The theme of the day was dogs. And we hid bones. And the children found them. And we ate cake, and took photographs. And had a wonderfully happy time. And Theo was completely joyous, very, very, happy, being in Under Spring.

AUTUMN ROONEY: It was evening. It wasn’t too hot. They were worried it was going to be hot. And also we were worried about the trains passing like right when they say the vows, but luckily no trains passed.

JENNA DIDIER: Under Spring is a beacon for those that can envision a different city—the neon signs there say it all.

MATIAS VIEGENER: We planted tomatoes in unused traffic islands, basically, all over Northeast Los Angeles. They were planted in spots where there should’ve been green things, where there was soil, and that were actually being irrigated but nothing was growing. 86 UNDER SPRING

FABIAN WAGMISTER: [My daughter, Sue, is] this amazing bridging force. You want people to talk to your children and you want your children to be in touch with people.

JANET OWEN DRIGGS: Theo loves trains. Theo went on a miniature train on Monday, for the first time. Yes, the choo choo is a very important factor in his life.

KAREN TAYLOR: Our officiant had made a sign for us to hold up that said “Pause.” Just in case the train came by. On the other side of the sign she’d written “Applause,” so that when it was all over she could hold it up.

OLIVER HESS: From the outset our wedding was designed to be a series of events that linked all the areas that we work in.

FABIAN WAGMISTER: You can be a loner when you are single, but you cannot be a loner when you have kids. You have to go out. And I think that that’s been very healthy for us. Of course, that’s not the reason to have children—we love our daughter!

ARI KLETZKY: We were planting a bunch of tomato plants—about seventy tomato plants on twelve traffic islands in Northeast L.A.—as a way to explore the availability of those public spaces.

JANET OWEN DRIGGS: Theo kept laughing and trying to jump in the pond. And crawling as fast as he possibly could, from one end of the place to the other. He just loved to crawl at that point. And I think it was the pond that he really, really liked.

AUTUMN ROONEY: Flo is one of my oldest friends and it was just a mixture of her bohemian friends and her husband’s old South Pasadena family friends. And a lot of them probably don’t come downtown too much. But it was beautiful. They just put some potted plants on the stage and it was very simple.

OLIVER HESS: We were already showing a piece of work in the Glow festival the night before the wedding and also had a moon pavilion built for us by friends that night on the Santa Monica beach made from hundreds of LED-illuminated balloons tied together. ANOTHER CITY IS POSSIBLE 87

FABIAN WAGMISTER: But also, [Sue has] played really into this. For example, we get a lot of the Chinese women that work a couple of buildings down, as they are walking out every day, saying, “Bye-bye, bye-bye.” So it’s a very nice thing going on. I think that’s one of the things that this neighborhood needs: a few more residents.

MATIAS VIEGENER: Our hope was basically that the tomato plants would grow unmolested and that we would be able to harvest them at some point; but also that other people would come upon them and either eat the tomatoes or just look at them. That had a mixed history. Some of the plants were mutilated and—and others survived.

KAREN TAYLOR: Our friend Eddie played his accordion during the ceremony. We had potted orange flowers and we wanted our cake to look like one of the mushroom stumps here, so we did white meringue mushrooms so that we had mushrooms everywhere and flowers all within the food.

OLIVER HESS: We spent the night celebrating on the beach and in the morning got dressed and went to Under Spring for an amazing organic meal made by our friends from Large Marge Sustainables. The groomsmen [and I] then led everyone to the Anabolic Monument, on the Cornfield site, where taiko drummers played as Jenna and the bridesmaids walked from the far end of the park to the assembled crowd, led by Dorian Bon [Lauren Bon’s son, a musician], drumming.

FABIAN WAGMISTER: I’m not sure if I’m talking about massive development— probably that’s not what I would want. But I think with a few more residents, it would warm up. And it would make us all a little more unified. Right now it’s a little sort of still industrial, institutional.

AUTUMN ROONEY: They had a big, beautiful cake that looked like mushrooms, because at the time we were working on mushrooms here. It was just kind of informal and fun. And it was a full moon. I remember everybody being captivated by the moon and they all ran over to the corner to watch it rise. 88 UNDER SPRING

MATIAS VIEGENER: At the end of that project and that experiment in public space we wanted to have a harvest festival, so we thought we would pick the tomatoes and make salsa, and also—at the same time—play salsa music and call it Salsa Salsa.

KAREN TAYLOR: I think some of the older guests were a little suspicious about the whole thing, just because it was in a nontraditional space. But overall everybody was really excited about it because who wants to go sit in a stuffy building and eat boiled chicken?

OLIVER HESS: One of our oldest friends, Phil, dressed as a bishop in red and black with sunglasses, married us, using a fifties microphone and amp as we stood on top of a platform built by [another friend]. We said our vows, drank thimble-sized amounts of champagne with hundreds of friends, and then held an after party at Mountain Bar in Chinatown.

ARI KLETZKY: We worked with people from Farmlab to create an afternoon where people could come and interact in this interesting mixture between dance and salsa and public space and ecology.

JANET OWEN DRIGGS: The older children said that they really enjoyed themselves. It was a place where they were very safe, protected from the traffic. Their parents would let them run around. And yet the trains are literally feet away, and they loved that.

NICK TAYLOR: The people who knew us immediately thought, “Perfect.” Because it does symbolize a lot of what we’re about.

ARI KLETZKY: Dave [Burns, of Fallen Fruit] and I were sitting around and we wanted to find a location that had a connection with what the Love Apples project was about—public space and the use of public space and the question “What is public space?” And I think that’s obviously an element of Under Spring and Farmlab. And then of course, there’s also the connection [to] growing. ANOTHER CITY IS POSSIBLE 89

KAREN TAYLOR: Everybody just really enjoyed being here. Because it was our space. You know, it wasn’t some artificial place that we never would spend time in. And the thing is that we love to spend time here. And we both grew up next to train tracks, so that kind of made sense, too.

ARI KLETZKY: There’s a connection in and interest in dialogue, which I think all three of the groups are interested in. So there were these, these kind of multiple layers of connections among all three of us that just seemed like such a natural fit. And we wanted to have local proximity and have it in a space that’s cultural, but not just white box cultural.

NICK TAYLOR: Maybe it’s not a coincidence—with this space and spaces like this—that I have worked with homeless people and done street outreach for fifteen years.

ARI KLETZKY: We invited the community. We had people making salsa. There were a bunch of tomatoes and all the other things that you would want to add to make your special salsa. We had a salsa band here, and a free salsa dance class.

KAREN TAYLOR: We like what this place was about. It was sort of city and garden all in one. Kind of goes along with how we like to live.

MATIAS VIEGENER: It was a great odd mix of humans. The kind of weird mix, which is really just a mix that emerges from language, right? From “salsa” having two meanings. It just created the most interesting result for us—it was one of those moments where I felt like the space got, like, another inch taller.

NICK TAYLOR: [Our officiant, Erica] basically talked for a while and then kinda reached behind the plants and pulled out a big screen.

ARI KLETZKY: We didn’t have a large crop. We had enough to make a bowl of salsa. So we made a bowl of traffic island salsa and then went around to people offering it to them and then asking them what they thought about traffic island salsa.

KAREN TAYLOR: She had a portable projector screen. 90 UNDER SPRING

MATIAS VIEGENER: Here we are, all dancing salsa under a bridge in the industrial part of the city. So it had a very integrated feeling, just whimsy.

NICK TAYLOR: And it was a picture of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, which was symbolizing us.

ARI KLETZKY: The way we found the salsa band is one of the band members was an employee of the Department of Public Works. We met the Department of Public Works on the traffic islands and there was this whole interaction and as a result they planted the tomato plants with us on an island in El Sereno. One of the employees was Rudy—he’s a bass player in a salsa band.

KAREN TAYLOR: I’m the peanut butter ’cause I’m kinda salty. He’s the jelly.

MATIAS VIEGENER: You would see the most eclectic mix of people dancing salsa, some of them fabulously and brilliantly, and some of them incredibly badly, and all having kind of insane fun and laughing. There was a giddy feeling and it was certainly related to the location.

KAREN TAYLOR: At the end of the ceremony, we toasted with a belt of scotch. It was nice to seal the deal.

ARI KLETZKY: The band was out here literally in front of the “Concrete Is Fluid” neon sign. The dance class was right here. The salsa-making was inside, in the kitchen. We were frying tortillas and there was sangria.

AUDREY TAYLOR: [Nick and Karen Taylor’s baby] Gehhh.

ARI KLETZKY: That connection happened in this public space in a city where you have a blending of Latino culture and history with Anglo and indigenous. So it was that kind of mixture, which is I think what salsa’s really about. The making of the salsa is this mixture. The dance is a mixture of different kinds of musical histories. And this space, I guess, is a space that has invited all these kind of different things. ANOTHER CITY IS POSSIBLE 91

KAREN TAYLOR: Audrey is our first project together. The fruit of our labor. Or, my labor.

ARI KLETZKY: This whole project was interweaving, like vines that grow together.

OLIVER HESS: Thank you, Under Spring, for giving us and our community this beautiful memory.

MATTHEW COOLIDGE: I never had been to the Under Spring location before. But Lauren and the Studio developing that resource there drew people into the space to confront it, and everything it represents. And that’s a real service.

LAUREN BON: Welcome to a little piece of magic, a little piece of the Mediterranean in your hometown.

ADOLFO V. NODAL: Under Spring is what we call a previous social brownfield. A place that was full of drugs and negative activity. It’s been remediated with good thoughts, good works, farming, and gardening, talking about things. All these were social remediations for Under Spring. It’s been a work with the community, for the community.

MANUEL CASTELLS: This [a neon sign that reads “Another City Is Possible”] is really kind of a piggybacking on the slogan that has been, from 2001 on, the slogan for movements that call themselves “Global Justice Movement,” which exist all over the world. They are coordinated over the Internet, by those that make public demonstrations.

RICHARD NIELSEN: When we had Lauren and Manuel [Castells] talk underneath the bridge at the second Optimists’ Breakfast, we moved Manuel’s piece [the neon sign reading “Another City Is Possible”] so that it was opposed to [the neon sign that reads] “Concrete Is Fluid.”

MANUEL CASTELLS: Fundamentally, [Movement for Global Justice] reacted not against globalization, but against the kind of globalization that had been happening and that has been presented as the only possible way—this kind of absolutely market-oriented type of globalization, [which ultimately reduces] societies to markets. 92 UNDER SPRING

RICHARD NIELSEN: In the evening we had both lights going on and we realized that it was a whole new relationship of reflections going on in the ponds back and forth from the two artworks and it totally changed the orientation of the artwork working underneath Spring Street. That was a period of time [when] the space really became activated as a bit more formal artwork rather than sort of a process- based artwork.

MANUEL CASTELLS: They launched this idea—another world is possible, meaning, wait a second, let’s discuss within the same technology, the same economy, the same everything, the other possibilities, and these other possibilities cannot be dictated by the elites of the world, by the elites of society. They have to be discussed, be debated and ultimately implemented by society at large, which means, ultimately, people.

RICHARD NIELSEN: The new neon went up, which is the “Wu Wei” gift from Dean [Qingyun] Ma: Chinese symbols [translating to “Do Nothing”], which are now in opposition to “Another City Is Possible.” There’s a definite conversation between Dean Ma and Manuel over their differences of opinions of the meanings of their two statements and their overall philosophy of what a city is, how to transform a city.

ANTHONY ADAMS: I hadn’t been here in years, and one of my friends—he was like, “Hey, let’s go hang out at the Tombs.” So we came here and then we seen this, and we seen the security right here. He was like a guard dog right there. We came, we didn’t even see him. He came up on the side of us with a light and then we asked him, “Where’s—what happened here?”

GERARDO VAQUERO ROSAS: I grew up in a small farm and we learned how to grow things, how to grow everything. Everything is growing very beautiful now and we have Señora Lauren to thank. If it weren’t for her these plants would have died. I hope she continues to take care of them for many years to come.

ANTHONY ADAMS: [The security guard] started telling us about the plants that you’re growing and how you guys get junk or stuff that you find and make something of it creative, so we asked him if we could look around and he escorted us all around here. ANOTHER CITY IS POSSIBLE 93

GERARDO VAQUERO ROSAS: See how the vine grows out or up, the way they grew up the lattice? I had to secure them, tie them, because they can weigh as much as twenty to thirty pounds. There are several kinds of squash, some white, some green, some striped. There are several kinds that I planted in the bins but there is mostly the tamalayotas, that is what we call that type of squash, and then there are some left to mature, or we say cáscara dura—hard skin—the yellow, the red ones, and white one.

MANUEL CASTELLS: Los Angeles has been presented as the city that is full of vitality, creativity, wealth creation—it attracts immigrants from all over the world. [But] as an urban form, it’s not functional, it’s not working. Its people take it because they have to, because it is what I call a combination of private affluence and public misery. Everything that is private flourishes; everything that is public is treated as disposable.

ANTHONY ADAMS: I came back a week later with more of my friends to show ’em. I’d say, “Man, look what they did to the Tombs.” So everybody’s comin’ over here.

GERARDO VAQUERO ROSAS: I’m gathering radish seeds from the plants here and also green bean seeds right now. Much of my time is spent collecting the seeds but I never neglect nurturing the plants either. I just now planted cilantro, more radish because we need to continue having the bins producing and filled with green beans.

MANUEL CASTELLS: Some people think that the world—even in our current form of social economic, social technological growth and organization—can be shaped differently when people want to do it and have imagination and the strength to do it. The same way, cities can be transformed. And I think that is particularly applicable to Los Angeles, because it is the city on which everybody has given up in terms of urban thought, in terms of the ability to increase quality of life. Of course, people believe in the beautiful tropical canyons, they don’t need anything. But as a city, not as private spaces within the city, [Los Angeles] has been given up on by people all over the world. 94 UNDER SPRING

GERARDO VAQUERO ROSAS: I do everyday thanks to God that I can continue growing this and the flowers, and Lauren continues to give me this work, and I’m very thankful. If the time comes that I’m no longer needed, well then that’s life, but I ask one thing: that all the plants go where somebody will take care of them; don’t let them die. They just need to be watered and taken care of. They will continue to live and produce fruit: guamoche, peach, apple, persimmons, avocados. They will give fruit by the middle of this coming summer, especially the bananas and the plants in the bins.

MANUEL CASTELLS: I think a number of people, and certainly the Farmlab people, and myself connected to that project, we think that another city is possible, and even in Los Angeles, another Los Angeles is possible.

ROGER ZEPEDA: Everybody would ask me, like, how was it now. I told them it’s clean. They all just laughed. They would always tell me that they could come in the night and, like, I guess, jump the fence. But everyone still goes to the other bridge over there.

PRINCE HALL: Everybody still come by. I see them doing aerobic class and everything. Ya know what? It’s nice up underneath there, man. You come up here and sit back and the breeze blowing you cool. I tell them all the time, I say, “Listen, hey, we can’t let you mess it up.”

CONRADO GARCIA: My favorite thing overall is the gardening. The plants help us breathe cleaner air, fresher air, purer air.

ROBYN SIMMS JOHNSON: It’s a hidden space, it’s a gem, a treasure. You get the feeling that you’re someplace else.

KAREN NOGUES: [It recharges] your battery every time you come here, and, you know, you have faith in the world. You can go out and you feel like you’re ready to do battle with evil, that you have confidence and friends and information from other corners of the globe. People converge here.

ROSA: I appreciate this because I have a little girl. She’s into nature; she has her own plants in front of my house. So I’m gonna bring her here. ANOTHER CITY IS POSSIBLE 95

ROGER ZEPEDA: [Some of my friends say] they should’ve left it the way it was. But that was their opinion. I like it here now, like that.

PEDRO CARRANZA: I remember talking to one guy, he worked around here for ten years. He said that before, when he was coming, it was scary. I ask people today, “What do you think now?” They say, “Now it’s different. It’s a good place.”

CONRADO GARCIA: The furniture people across the way, they see the change, they see all that we do. They say that it’s good—it’s got plants, flowers, it’s clean.

KAREN NOGUES: It’s like if you were hovering over the Earth, you would see this radiant spot here under the Spring Street Bridge.

SERGIO RODRIGUEZ JR.: I’ve been coming back doing some photo shoots here. I did one in the garden when the pumpkins were there. And then I think there was another installation still in the process, but I mean, I remember this place. And it looks way different than what it used to look like before. It’s an upgrade.

ANTHONY ADAMS: Lauren Bon? Boy, she got a beautiful vision.

RAMON MACIAS: I live close to here. People in the neighborhood say they changed a lot of things here. They’re happy because there are no more drugs here, no more violence.

ANTHONY ADAMS: This was our haven, but you guys made a real haven.

97 about the author

JEREMY ROSENBERG is a Los Angeles–based writer and editor whose words about urban planning, policy, ideas, history, culture, and much more have appeared in dozens of online and printed books, newspapers, and magazines.

A former employee of the Los Angeles Times and the Annenberg Foundation, Rosenberg is now an assistant dean at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Connect with him on Twitter @LosJeremy.

ABOUT THE CALIFORNIA HISTORICAL SOCIETY BOOK AWARD In 2013, after a twenty-year collaboration and with a shared commitment to finding new and inclusive ways to explore California’s history, the California Historical Society and Heyday established the California Historical Society Book Award as a way of inviting new voices and viewpoints into the conversation. Each year we bring together a jury of noted historians, scholars, and publishing experts to award a book-length manuscript that makes an important contribution to both scholarship and to the greater community by deepening public understanding of some aspect of California history. For more information, please visit www.heydaybooks.com/ chsbookaward or www.californiahistoricalsociety.org/publications/book_award.html.

ABOUT THE CALIFORNIA HISTORICAL SOCIETY Established in 1871, the California Historical Society inspires and empowers people to make California’s richly diverse past a meaningful part of their contemporary lives. We hold one of the top research collections on California history, which includes over 35,000 volumes of books and pamphlets, more than 4,000 manuscripts, and some 500,000 photographs documenting California’s social, cultural, economic, and political history and development, including some of the most cherished and valuable documents and images of California’s past.

ABOUT HEYDAY Heyday is an independent, nonprofit publisher and unique cultural institution that promotes widespread awareness and celebration of California’s many cultures, landscapes, and boundary-breaking ideas. Through its well-crafted books, public events, and innovative outreach programs, Heyday is building a vibrant community of readers, writers, and thinkers.

ABOUT HEYDAY Heyday is an independent, nonprofit publisher and unique cultural institution. We promote widespread awareness and celebration of California’s many cultures, landscapes, and boundary-breaking ideas. Through our well-crafted books, public events, and innovative outreach programs we are building a vibrant community of readers, writers, and thinkers.

THANK YOU It takes the collective effort of many to create a thriving literary culture. We are thankful to all the thoughtful people we have the privilege to engage with. Cheers to our writers, artists, editors, storytellers, designers, printers, bookstores, critics, cultural organizations, readers, and book lovers everywhere!

We are especially grateful for the generous funding we’ve received for our publications and programs during the past year from foundations and hundreds of individual donors. Major supporters include:

Anonymous (6); Alliance for California Traditional Arts; Arkay Foundation; Judy Avery; Paul Bancroft III; Richard and Rickie Ann Baum; BayTree Fund; S. D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation; Jean and Fred Berensmeier; Berkeley Civic Arts Program and Civic Arts Commission; Joan Berman; Nancy Bertelsen; Beatrice Bowles, in memory of Susan S. Lake; John Briscoe; Lewis and Sheana Butler; Cahill Contractors, Inc.; California Civil Liberties Public Education Program; Cal Humanities; California Indian Heritage Center Foundation; California State Parks Foundation; Keith Campbell Foundation; Candelaria Fund; John and Nancy Cassidy Family Foundation, through Silicon Valley Community Foundation; Charles Edwin Chase; Graham Chisholm; The Christensen Fund; Jon Christensen; Community Futures Collective; Compton Foundation; Creative Work Fund; Lawrence Crooks; Nik Dehejia; Chris Desser and Kirk Marckwald; Frances Dinkelspiel and Gary Wayne; The Durfee Foundation; Earth Island Institute; The Fred Gellert Family Foundation; Megan Fletcher and J.K. Dineen; Flow Fund Circle; Fulfillco; Furthur Foundation; The Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation; Nicola W. Gordon; Wanda Lee Graves and Stephen Duscha; David Guy; The Walter and Elise Haas Fund; Coke and James Hallowell; Steve Hearst; Cindy Heitzman; Historic Resources Group; Sandra and Charles Hobson; Donna Ewald Huggins; JiJi Foundation; Claudia Jurmain; Kalliopeia Foundation; Marty and Pamela Krasney; Robert and Karen Kustel; Guy Lampard and Suzanne Badenhoop; Christine Leefeldt, in celebration of Ernest Callenbach and Malcolm Margolin’s friendship; Thomas Lockard and Alix Marduel; Thomas J. Long Foundation; Michael McCone; Giles W. and Elise G. Mead Foundation; Moore Family Foundation; Michael J. Moratto, in memory of Berta Cassel; Karen and Thomas Mulvaney; The MSB Charitable Fund; Richard Nagler; National Wildlife Federation; Humboldt Area Foundation, Native Cultures Fund; The Nature Conservancy; Nightingale Family Foundation; Northern California Water Association; Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation; Panta Rhea Foundation; David Plant; Alan Rosenus; The San Francisco Foundation; Greg Sarris; Sierra College; William Somerville; Martha Stanley; Radha Stern, in honor of Malcolm Margolin and Diane Lee; Roselyne Chroman Swig; Tides Foundation; Sedge Thomson and Sylvia Brownrigg; TomKat Charitable Trust; Sonia Torres; Michael and Shirley Traynor; The Roger J. and Madeleine Traynor Foundation; Lisa Van Cleef and Mark Gunson; Patricia Wakida; John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; Peter Booth Wiley and Valerie Barth; Bobby Winston; Dean Witter Foundation; and Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation.

BOARD OF DIRECTORS Guy Lampard (Chairman), Richard D. Baum, Barbara Boucke, Steve Costa, Nik Dehejia, Lokelani Devone, Theresa Harlan, Nettie Hoge, Marty Krasney, Katharine Livingston, Michael McCone (Chairman Emeritus), Alexandra Rome, Sonia Torres, Michael Traynor, Lisa Van Cleef, and Patricia Wakida.

GETTING INVOLVED To learn more about our publications, events, membership club, and other ways you can participate, please visit www.heydaybooks.com.